Hillary Clinton says she thinks Barack Obama is inexperienced and naive if he thinks he can bring a fresh approach to foreign affairs. Too bad. What's wrong with the current approach is evident in the US standing in the world when it comes to respect. Obama would meet face to face with leaders of nations George W. Bush considers evil. Obama also would not let Pakistan off the hook when it comes to fighting terrorism. If Pakistan won't do the job of going after terrorists hiding there and in the border areas with Afghanistan, the US will.
Obama also has a good take on the intense focus on the N, B and H words by some civil rights and civic leaders to the exclusion of other issues. In the current VIBE magazine, where he's on the cover, he says: "My priority as a U.S. senator is dealing with poverty and educational opportunity and adequate health care. If I'm ignoring those issues and spending all my time worrying about rap lyrics, then I'm wasting my time."
The NAACP has taken up this cause; so, too, has Al Sharpton. Let Obama focus on other matters.
Showing posts with label Al Sharpton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Al Sharpton. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Genarlow Wilson Needs Your Help
If you aren’t familiar with the name, check out my piece at BET.com, under “news.” The long way to find the piece is to use this link:
http://www.bet.com/NR/exeres/4927A8FA-C78B-4A7F-BA42-580C489DAD91.htm?
Wilson behaved rather irresponsibly when he was 17 and, at a raucous party in 2003, had oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. No one – not even the girl’s mother – denies that the sex was consensual. But under a law then in effect in Georgia, Wilson was charged with child molestation and was ultimately sentenced to a mandatory 10-year prison term in 2005. If he did the same thing today, the maximum sentence he would face is a year in jail. Even though the law changed last year, it does not cover him.
Of course, something CAN be done about that if enough people pressure the right people. These include:
Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker, Office of the Attorney General, 40 Capitol Square SW, Atlanta, Ga. 30334. Phone: 404-656-3300. Fax: 404-657-8733.
Douglas County District Attorney David McDade
dmcdade@co.douglas.ga.us
Phone: 770-920-7292
According to the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, various officials say they are afraid that freeing Wilson – though it’s the right thing in his case – would “open the floodgates” and lead to chaos in the criminal justice system because other sex offenders would demand reconsideration of their cases. But, Warnock notes, of the roughly 1,300 sex offenders behind bars in Georgia, only seven involve people who were minors when prosecuted and not all of those seven were involved in consensual sexual acts.
“It just boils down to basic politics,” Warnock said of the officials hiding behind the old law and passing the buck – while Wilson remains in prison with an uncertain future.
http://www.bet.com/NR/exeres/4927A8FA-C78B-4A7F-BA42-580C489DAD91.htm?
Wilson behaved rather irresponsibly when he was 17 and, at a raucous party in 2003, had oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. No one – not even the girl’s mother – denies that the sex was consensual. But under a law then in effect in Georgia, Wilson was charged with child molestation and was ultimately sentenced to a mandatory 10-year prison term in 2005. If he did the same thing today, the maximum sentence he would face is a year in jail. Even though the law changed last year, it does not cover him.
Of course, something CAN be done about that if enough people pressure the right people. These include:
Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker, Office of the Attorney General, 40 Capitol Square SW, Atlanta, Ga. 30334. Phone: 404-656-3300. Fax: 404-657-8733.
Douglas County District Attorney David McDade
dmcdade@co.douglas.ga.us
Phone: 770-920-7292
According to the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, various officials say they are afraid that freeing Wilson – though it’s the right thing in his case – would “open the floodgates” and lead to chaos in the criminal justice system because other sex offenders would demand reconsideration of their cases. But, Warnock notes, of the roughly 1,300 sex offenders behind bars in Georgia, only seven involve people who were minors when prosecuted and not all of those seven were involved in consensual sexual acts.
“It just boils down to basic politics,” Warnock said of the officials hiding behind the old law and passing the buck – while Wilson remains in prison with an uncertain future.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
AL SHARPTON’S STRATEGY
For everyone who wonders why Al Sharpton is in the public eye as a Black civil rights Superman when so many others are accomplishing so much more in a less flamboyant way, I recommend reading an online article in City Hall (www.cityhallnews.com) by Edward-Isaac Dovere.
A couple of snippets:
“Cynics say, ‘He plays the media,’” Sharpton said. “But if I play the media toward the end goal, that’s saying I’m competent.”
------------------------------------------
Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama are among those doing the math. Both want his presidential endorsement, and Sharpton has been making them wait. Both could benefit enormously in public perception from the reverend’s backing—Clinton by cementing the foothold in the African-American community her husband enjoyed in his own presidential runs, Obama by using it to help dispel a disconnect some prominent African-Americans have described feeling toward him. Both have made very strong appeals.
One thing many assume is weighing on Sharpton’s mind is jealousy of Obama, a worry that the Illinois senator’s ascendancy might mean that Sharpton gets eclipsed on the national political scene.
Sharpton dismisses this notion.
“We’re both athletes,” he said. “I box, he plays baseball. I mean, it’s different parts. It’s crazy.”
----------------------------------------------
[ I kind of get his point. Scary!!! Actually, as anyone who knows Obama knows, he plays BASKETBALL!!]
A couple of snippets:
“Cynics say, ‘He plays the media,’” Sharpton said. “But if I play the media toward the end goal, that’s saying I’m competent.”
------------------------------------------
Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama are among those doing the math. Both want his presidential endorsement, and Sharpton has been making them wait. Both could benefit enormously in public perception from the reverend’s backing—Clinton by cementing the foothold in the African-American community her husband enjoyed in his own presidential runs, Obama by using it to help dispel a disconnect some prominent African-Americans have described feeling toward him. Both have made very strong appeals.
One thing many assume is weighing on Sharpton’s mind is jealousy of Obama, a worry that the Illinois senator’s ascendancy might mean that Sharpton gets eclipsed on the national political scene.
Sharpton dismisses this notion.
“We’re both athletes,” he said. “I box, he plays baseball. I mean, it’s different parts. It’s crazy.”
----------------------------------------------
[ I kind of get his point. Scary!!! Actually, as anyone who knows Obama knows, he plays BASKETBALL!!]
Friday, April 13, 2007
The Imus Mess
I
IMUS was never a must for me
Imus is going down – at least on MSNBC on television and CBS on radio and with major advertisers and with politicians and journalists and other celebrities who’ve lent credibility to his show so many years.
I’ve never listened to or watched Imus or any other shock jock. Just as I refused to watch a sitcom that famously billed itself as a show about nothing (Seinfeld), I’ve refused to participate in the shock jock cult. There’s too much to be shocked about in the real world to support repugnant, outrageous, insulting commentary as entertainment, often at the expense of the underdog.
Why Imus and his producer felt the need to denigrate 10 young women who had overcome great odds to reach the final game in the NCAA basketball championship is beyond understanding. These young women, ages 18 to 20, were not “nappy headed” (Most seem to have perms, for god’s sake!). And there is absolutely nothing to indicate that these very disciplined, very academically sound young women are “whores”. (Definitions: “a prostitute; a person considered sexually promiscuous; a person considered as having compromised principles for personal gain”)
Hmmm. That last definition sounds more like Imus than the Rutgers team.
II
Where are White women?
Imus did not just insult Blacks, but also women. Quickly this became an Imus versus “the Black community” conflict. The sexism in his no-infamous line has pretty much been ignored except by a handful of Black women. And so I ask again: Where are White women?
III
There is power in protest
If anything, this fallout from Imus’s on-air idiocy has demonstrated the power of speaking out and of making economic demands that can influence social policy. It was one thing for the Rev. Al Sharpton to use his various bully pulpits to speak out; this went to a whole new level when major advertisers listened and decided to withdraw their support for Imus’s show.
Vote with your hands. Change the dial. Don’t listen to the Imuses of the airwaves. But if the other Imuses out there say something as despicable as he did, don’t fear to use the power of the purse. Encourage advertisers to withdraw their support.
I’m encouraged by this mobilization of this particular coalition of the willing. Now it needs to carry on to assault those aspects of hip-hop culture that have usurped that culture and turned it into something that makes an Imus comfortable with referring to Black women as whores. There are big corporate bucks out there behind this aspect of hip-hop. Let’s go after them.
IV
Post-embarrassment “therapy”
Imus didn’t rush into therapy for alcoholism or temporary mental illness or whatever the way other celebrities have done after getting caught with their inner-hatred unleashed and facing the loss of income.
But that 2 ½ hours at the New Jersey Governor’s Mansion with the Rutgers team and its coaches must have been more intense than anything Isaiah Washington or Mel Gibson experienced during their rush-to-therapy after expressions of homophobia (Washington of television’s Grey’s Anatomy) and anti-Semitism (Gibson, the actor, director and producer) or racism (Michael Richards, the comic most famous as a character on Seinfeld).
V
Once again Sen. McCain called it wrong
As various Imus regulars – politicians, journalists, etcetera – announced their intent to boycott Imus’s show, McCain said he accepted Imus’s apologies and would gladly return to Imus In the Morning.
He can’t get it right. Just a few days ago, after visiting a market in Baghdad surrounded by about 100 heavily-armed soldiers and with military helicopters hovering overhead and sharpshooters positioned on rooftops, he came back espousing the Bush administration party line: The streets are much safer in Baghdad these days; the war is being won.
And then he had to admit, after public humiliation by not just US bloggers but also by Iraqi civilians who know otherwise, that he’d been wearing rose-colored glasses and had “misspoke.”
Is this man ready for his closeup as a viable presidential candidate?
IMUS was never a must for me
Imus is going down – at least on MSNBC on television and CBS on radio and with major advertisers and with politicians and journalists and other celebrities who’ve lent credibility to his show so many years.
I’ve never listened to or watched Imus or any other shock jock. Just as I refused to watch a sitcom that famously billed itself as a show about nothing (Seinfeld), I’ve refused to participate in the shock jock cult. There’s too much to be shocked about in the real world to support repugnant, outrageous, insulting commentary as entertainment, often at the expense of the underdog.
Why Imus and his producer felt the need to denigrate 10 young women who had overcome great odds to reach the final game in the NCAA basketball championship is beyond understanding. These young women, ages 18 to 20, were not “nappy headed” (Most seem to have perms, for god’s sake!). And there is absolutely nothing to indicate that these very disciplined, very academically sound young women are “whores”. (Definitions: “a prostitute; a person considered sexually promiscuous; a person considered as having compromised principles for personal gain”)
Hmmm. That last definition sounds more like Imus than the Rutgers team.
II
Where are White women?
Imus did not just insult Blacks, but also women. Quickly this became an Imus versus “the Black community” conflict. The sexism in his no-infamous line has pretty much been ignored except by a handful of Black women. And so I ask again: Where are White women?
III
There is power in protest
If anything, this fallout from Imus’s on-air idiocy has demonstrated the power of speaking out and of making economic demands that can influence social policy. It was one thing for the Rev. Al Sharpton to use his various bully pulpits to speak out; this went to a whole new level when major advertisers listened and decided to withdraw their support for Imus’s show.
Vote with your hands. Change the dial. Don’t listen to the Imuses of the airwaves. But if the other Imuses out there say something as despicable as he did, don’t fear to use the power of the purse. Encourage advertisers to withdraw their support.
I’m encouraged by this mobilization of this particular coalition of the willing. Now it needs to carry on to assault those aspects of hip-hop culture that have usurped that culture and turned it into something that makes an Imus comfortable with referring to Black women as whores. There are big corporate bucks out there behind this aspect of hip-hop. Let’s go after them.
IV
Post-embarrassment “therapy”
Imus didn’t rush into therapy for alcoholism or temporary mental illness or whatever the way other celebrities have done after getting caught with their inner-hatred unleashed and facing the loss of income.
But that 2 ½ hours at the New Jersey Governor’s Mansion with the Rutgers team and its coaches must have been more intense than anything Isaiah Washington or Mel Gibson experienced during their rush-to-therapy after expressions of homophobia (Washington of television’s Grey’s Anatomy) and anti-Semitism (Gibson, the actor, director and producer) or racism (Michael Richards, the comic most famous as a character on Seinfeld).
V
Once again Sen. McCain called it wrong
As various Imus regulars – politicians, journalists, etcetera – announced their intent to boycott Imus’s show, McCain said he accepted Imus’s apologies and would gladly return to Imus In the Morning.
He can’t get it right. Just a few days ago, after visiting a market in Baghdad surrounded by about 100 heavily-armed soldiers and with military helicopters hovering overhead and sharpshooters positioned on rooftops, he came back espousing the Bush administration party line: The streets are much safer in Baghdad these days; the war is being won.
And then he had to admit, after public humiliation by not just US bloggers but also by Iraqi civilians who know otherwise, that he’d been wearing rose-colored glasses and had “misspoke.”
Is this man ready for his closeup as a viable presidential candidate?
Sunday, February 25, 2007
So Al Sharpton Is Discovering the Roots Beneath the Hairdo!
The New York Daily News and the Rev. Al Sharpton are making a big deal -- as in a multiple-part series -- about the Rev's learning a few days ago that some of his ancestors were once owned by some of the kinfolk of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.
Well, wow!
Anyone who knows the history of this country knows that that is no big thing.
Most Blacks in the US, myself included, can trace some part of their family tree to some White folks -- and vice versa if Whites are so inclined. I do now have older White people considering me a "cousin" or somehow in an-as- yet-to-be-defined way, kinfolk. I've even been graciously hosted by White people on a visit to the remains of an Allison plantation in North Carolina where some of my folks toiled and some of their descendants still live. In South Carolina, there is a city called Aiken, named for White folks from Ireland whose family in South Carolina and in Georgia owned some of my ancestors. I've got a bill of sale for Ike Aikens -- spelling was always a matter of who was doing the writing -- the grandfather of my 103-year-old grandmother, Ethel Mae Aiken Moore, still ruling the roost in Conyers, Ga. I know so much about the White Shipp lineage that I sometimes hear from the White folks about getting started with their genealogical searches. (A bit of trivia: the "S" in Harry S. Truman, the president, was apparently SHIPP.)
After the death of Thurmond, a notorious racist as he built his political career but repentant towards the end, it was officially acknowledged that he had fathered a Black daughter some 70 years before and had, in his own typical-of-the-old-South way, supported her through college and beyond.
As I have said many times before, we are all mutts. A little dab of this, a little dab of that -- and that makes us all the more American.
Perhaps the presidential odyssey of Barack Obama, a true African American because of his White American mother and his Black Kenyan father, has us more attuned to issues of racial identity. Think of this: The only certified descendants of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson, the president, and his Black slave/concubine/mistress Sally Hemings is a WHITE family in Staten Island, N.Y. The putative BLACK descendants haven't been able to convince those who need to be convinced.
To understand how all of this is ridiculous when defining ourselves in the 21st century, take a look at a booklet done by the late J. A. Rogers called "The Five Negro Presidents." It was published in 1965 and is available online and in Afrocentric bookstores. Based on the way Blackness in the US was defined as any knowable or rumored genetic connection to a Black person, however meager, Rogers came up with five; to his list, others have added at least one more. So neither Jesse Jackson nor Colin Powell nor Barack Obama would, truly, be a first.
And, of course, we are ALL Africans, if you believe the scientists who have traced all living humanity to that continent. The Rev told the News this about the discovery of his supposed connection to Thurmond: "It tells you who you are. Where you come from. Where your bloodline is."
I beg to differ: This information may tell you something about your bloodline, but it can never tell you who you are.
Well, wow!
Anyone who knows the history of this country knows that that is no big thing.
Most Blacks in the US, myself included, can trace some part of their family tree to some White folks -- and vice versa if Whites are so inclined. I do now have older White people considering me a "cousin" or somehow in an-as- yet-to-be-defined way, kinfolk. I've even been graciously hosted by White people on a visit to the remains of an Allison plantation in North Carolina where some of my folks toiled and some of their descendants still live. In South Carolina, there is a city called Aiken, named for White folks from Ireland whose family in South Carolina and in Georgia owned some of my ancestors. I've got a bill of sale for Ike Aikens -- spelling was always a matter of who was doing the writing -- the grandfather of my 103-year-old grandmother, Ethel Mae Aiken Moore, still ruling the roost in Conyers, Ga. I know so much about the White Shipp lineage that I sometimes hear from the White folks about getting started with their genealogical searches. (A bit of trivia: the "S" in Harry S. Truman, the president, was apparently SHIPP.)
After the death of Thurmond, a notorious racist as he built his political career but repentant towards the end, it was officially acknowledged that he had fathered a Black daughter some 70 years before and had, in his own typical-of-the-old-South way, supported her through college and beyond.
As I have said many times before, we are all mutts. A little dab of this, a little dab of that -- and that makes us all the more American.
Perhaps the presidential odyssey of Barack Obama, a true African American because of his White American mother and his Black Kenyan father, has us more attuned to issues of racial identity. Think of this: The only certified descendants of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson, the president, and his Black slave/concubine/mistress Sally Hemings is a WHITE family in Staten Island, N.Y. The putative BLACK descendants haven't been able to convince those who need to be convinced.
To understand how all of this is ridiculous when defining ourselves in the 21st century, take a look at a booklet done by the late J. A. Rogers called "The Five Negro Presidents." It was published in 1965 and is available online and in Afrocentric bookstores. Based on the way Blackness in the US was defined as any knowable or rumored genetic connection to a Black person, however meager, Rogers came up with five; to his list, others have added at least one more. So neither Jesse Jackson nor Colin Powell nor Barack Obama would, truly, be a first.
And, of course, we are ALL Africans, if you believe the scientists who have traced all living humanity to that continent. The Rev told the News this about the discovery of his supposed connection to Thurmond: "It tells you who you are. Where you come from. Where your bloodline is."
I beg to differ: This information may tell you something about your bloodline, but it can never tell you who you are.
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