Los Angeles Times wire reports

May 25, 2012

by CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: May 25, 2012

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: May 11, 2012

By N.R. KLEINFIELD
Published: May 11, 2012

By ALICE RANDALL
Published: May 5, 2012

Summer 2002 | City Journal | by John H. McWhorter

April 26, 2012 | WSJ | By JOANNE KAUFMAN.

Former investment banker Stephen Byrd, 55, is one of the very few African-American producers on Broadway, and the first (with Alia Jones) to win London's Olivier Award, isn't interested in business as usual....The producer learning curve is steep enough. But Mr. Byrd has set himself an added challenge: attracting nontraditional audiences.

February 18, 2007 | New York Times | by RON STODGHILL

11. driver8 wrote:

#10 I agree with much that you say, especially in regards to political under representation of visible minorities. Sadly it remains the case in some contexts both within the US (e.g. Senate) and in both Canada and the UK. In electoral politics that use first past the post voting systems, sadly, it seems that the ethnicity of the electorate remains an important factor in determining outcomes. The visible minority make up of the US is importantly different than for example both Canada and the UK.

Black Americans comprised 27% of the population of New York in the 2000 census. The 2006 census showed about 7% of the population of metropolitan Toronto was black.

In 2000 the black population formed almost 16% of the total population of New York State. In Ontario in 2001 people of African and Caribbean origin were a bit under 5% of the population.

In the 2001 census black Canadians were a little over 2% of the population. In 2000 approximately 13% of Americans reported themselves as black or black and at least one additional “race”.

In the UK progress is being made as parties select more visible minority candidates to stand for election. I don’t know how political parties select candidates in Canada. Is the same happening there?
November 10, 8:15 pm | [comment link]

September 27, 2000 | WSJ | Excepts

April 6, 2012 | WSJ | by Shelby Steele.

The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

April 4, 2012 | WSJ | Letter to the editors by Rick Nagel.

Regarding Juan Williams's "The Trayvon Martin Tragedies" (op-ed, March 28): The marchers are asking that George Zimmerman, who shot Martin, be arrested immediately and, if the facts justify, charged and tried. That goal is a narrow, short-term one, achievable through protest. Black crime, failing schools, single parenthood in the black community and the rap culture's pervasive influence are far more difficult issues for policy makers and cannot be redressed in the short term, certainly not through marches.

Mr. Williams reinforces the image of a dysfunctional black culture pervaded by crime, illegitimacy, poverty and ignorance in the guise of decrying it. That is not the image that I have of the thousands of black students I taught and knew in my 36-year teaching career. They are entrepreneurs, fund managers, attorneys, teachers, social-service providers, carpenters and hospital administrators. They are not out on the street committing crimes or in prison. They are not collecting welfare. Rather, they are contributing to the well-being of the communities in which they live; they are working to support their families, and they are doing all they can to see that their values become those of their children.

April 4, 2012 | WSJ | Letter to the editor by Uwe Siemon-Netto.
Rick Nagel's response (Letters, March 31) to Juan Williams's "The Trayvon Martin Tragedies" provides a sad testimony of the current state of journalism. Why do we read and hear so little of those black "entrepreneurs, fund managers, attorneys, teachers" who once studied under Mr. Nagel and similar teachers?

December 27, 2002 | WSJ | By MATTHEW HAMEL.

Kwanzaa was started in the late 1960s by Maulana (ne Ron) Karenga -- a California civil-rights activist and now a professor -- as a series of days for blacks to reflect on "The Seven Principles," which constitute a credo "by which Black people must live in order to begin to rescue and reconstruct our history and lives." The principles themselves are utility, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which goes by its name in Kiswahili, the major language of the East African country of Tanzania (e.g., umoja, ujima, ujamaa).

By PAUL VITELLO
Published: April 5, 2012

By KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD
Published: April 5, 2012

March 27, 2012,| WSJ |By JUAN WILLIAMS.

The Trayvon Martin Tragedies
The recent killing of Trayvon Martin needs more investigation. But where's the outrage over the daily scourge of black-on-black crime?

March 22, 2012 | WSJ |By JULIE JARGON

By Tanner Colby|Posted Wednesday, March 14, 2012,

By Tanner Colby|Posted Wednesday, March 14, 2012

By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: March 6, 2012

By JAMES CAMPBELL

Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance

By Emily Bernard

November 22, 2002 | WSJ | By ALLEN GUELZO.

Reason in Disrepair

August 29, 2004 | NYT | By RACHEL L. SWARNS.

By FERNANDA SANTOS
February 25, 2012

By: Rick C. Wade
Posted: October 10, 2011

By KIM SEVERSON
Published: February 19, 2012

February 14, 2012, 8:30 am
Viola Davis on a Mind-Set That She Says Harms Black Actors
By MELENA RYZIK

“I want you to win,” Mr. Smiley said, “but I’m ambivalent about what you’re winning for.”

Ms. Davis was direct. “That very mind-set that you have and that a lot of African-Americans have is absolutely destroying the black artist,” she said.

“The black artist cannot live in a revisionist place,” she added. “The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy. People are messy. Caucasian actors know that.”

By BRENT STAPLES
February 11, 2012

Black artists are often faced with the problem of having to elevate through sheer skill material that is stereotypical or even racist.

Feb. 1, 2012 | By LYNN ELBER

27 January 2012

January 16, 2005 | NYT | By EMILY EAKIN who reviews a book by Stanley Crouch. THE ARTIFICIAL WHITE MAN
Essays on Authenticity.
By Stanley Crouch.
244 pp. Basic Civitas Books. $24.

Couch bemoans the mindless elevation by whites and blacks alike of urban street mores -- what he calls ''the bottom'' -- to the epitome of cool and worries about the implications for a struggling black population: ''This redefinition of black authenticity all the way downward . . . is a new kind of American decadence excused by many Negroes because of the money it makes for a handful of black polluters, onstage and offstage,'' he complains. ''The crudest, most irresponsible vision of materialism is fused to a naive sense of how far one can go in the world even if illiterate and unskilled.''...In a similar vein, he laments the idolization of badly behaving N.B.A. superstars and the spread of anti-intellectualism (''the greatest crisis that has ever faced the black community is the present disengagement from the world of education'').

JANUARY 18, 2006 | WSJ | by FERGUS M. BORDEWICH.

"Behind the riots lay a combustible mix of racism, poverty and class resentment that was fanned into violence by pro-Southern Democratic politicians and journalistic demagogues. Not all the rioters were Irish, but enough were to give the mobs a Hibernian cast, nearly erasing the reputation for patriotic sacrifice that Irish volunteers had earned on the battlefields of the Civil War."

January 6, 2012 | NYT | Letters to the editor in reaction to an article by CHARLES M. BLOW
Progressive Power
Florida

Todays GOP is in large part the same constituency that made up the Dixiecrats during Jim Crow...and the old Democrat Plantation owners who formed the confederacy and committed treason against the United States -a crime for which they were never held fully accountable nor punished even by confiscation of their ill-earned Manses...the Southern Strategy is , sadly, alive and well...with a nation-wide appeal to frustrated whites seeking a scapegoat .
This vitriol is made all the more dynamic by having an African-American President who serves as a lightning rod for all their pent up hatred....(BTW: Isnt it interesting that they never point out that our president is also half white-Irish , no less!)

Jan. 7, 2012 at 5:09 p.m.
Recommended25

Claire
Chevy Chase MD

This reminds me of the slave owners who while watching their slaves in the fields, would complain about how slow and lazy the slaves were.

If white people had less wealth than any other group in the US, we might wonder how the hell could that be? As white people we have dominated every piece of legislation, directed wealth to our own communities, decided who can or cannot participate in government... had our schools and residences built by black people while denying them use and entrance (except to clean), even though we forced them to pay taxes for public buildings and services, we prohibited their use, we told them they were inferior, ran from communities when they 'integrated' our neighborhoods, encouraged European immigrants to discriminate against black people, only gave them the lowest paying, most dangerous jobs, while closing our country club doors to them.

How in hell could black people not be at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder? We've created a world where those of us with white skin have been given every advantage and privilege. The generational wealth alone of whites will keep black people at the bottom for centuries.

Jan. 7, 2012 at 5:09 p.m.

12/12/2011 | Forbes | Gene Marks, Contributor.

By ANGELA STANLEY
Published: December 10, 2011

DECEMBER 9, 2011
Guess Who's Coming to the Vineyard
By TERRY TEACHOUT

December 7, 2011, 8:45 PM
Washington’s Black Codes
By KATE MASUR

December 6, 2011, 9:00 PM
Caught Out of Time
By KARENNA GORE SCHIFF

November 28, 2011 |NYT | By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS.

The central role played by government employment in black communities is hard to overstate. African-Americans in the public sector earn 25 percent more than other black workers, and the jobs have long been regarded as respectable, stable work for college graduates, allowing many to buy homes, send children to private colleges and achieve other markers of middle-class life that were otherwise closed to them.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Ted Hayes: Prejudice
Black Republicans should be able to live without fear.

The Wall Street Journal
Monday, January 2, 2006

January 20, 2002 | NY Times | By Adam Shatz

DECEMBER 24, 2005 | WSJ | By TERRY TEACHOUT.
Not for Blacks Only. Why group identity is bad for culture (except when it's good)

That kind of pigeonholing is what the Oscar-winning star of such films as "Unforgiven" and "The Shawshank Redemption" must have had in mind when he complained about Black History Month in a recent "60 Minutes" interview. "You're going to relegate my history to a month?" he asked Mike Wallace. "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history." The way to stamp out racism, he added, is to "stop talking about it. ... I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man."

At a time when the angry irredentism of identity politics has blighted so much of America's cultural discourse, those are fighting words, defiant and inspiring. By speaking them in front of millions of TV viewers, Mr. Freeman stood up for his own individual excellence as an artist. But he also pointed to a different, equally important question: Is group identity -- race, gender, ethnicity, religion -- truly irrelevant to art? Or can it be used in a way that is not polarizing but "inclusive," in the best sense of that heavily freighted word?....Herein, I believe, lies the test of the utility of identity politics, cultural or otherwise. Is it inclusive or exclusive?

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

FEBRUARY 1, 2006 | WSJ | By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

February 19, 2007 | FORTUNE | John Simons

The age of white guilt: and the disappearance of the black individual


Essay



By Shelby Steele

Harper's Magazine, November 30, 1999

JULY 30, 2004 | WSJ | Jason L. Riley

Dems Score With Blacks as GOP Forfeits the Game
If the Republicans want to win black votes, why aren't they on BET?

MAY 25, 2004

By week's end Mr. Cosby had issued a statement pointing out that most of the news accounts dropped the context within which his remarks were delivered: a 50% high school dropout rate for inner-city African-American males that he rightly characterized as an "epidemic." In other words, Mr. Cosby's argument is that 1) a 50% black dropout rate ought to be regarded as a national scandal in a post-Brown America; and 2) dysfunctional behavior is dysfunctional whatever one's skin color.

Surely it says something about Mr. Cosby's critics that they are more disturbed by his speaking out than they are about the underlying crisis he's trying to address.

By JODI KANTOR
Published: December 26, 2006

By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR
Published: August 01, 2004

Scholars such as my Harvard colleague William Julius Wilson say that the causes of black poverty are both structural and behavioral. Think of structural causes as ''the devil made me do it,'' and behavioral causes as ''the devil is in me.'' Structural causes are faceless systemic forces, like the disappearance of jobs. Behavioral causes are self-destructive life choices and personal habits. To break the conspiracy of silence, we have to address both of these factors.

By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.

Published: September 19, 2004

By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
Published: February 4, 2007

Being articulate must surely be a baseline requirement for a former president of The Harvard Law Review. After all, Webster’s definitions of the word include “able to speak” and “expressing oneself easily and clearly.” It would be more incredible, more of a phenomenon, to borrow two more of the senator’s puzzling words, if Mr. Obama were inarticulate.

That is the core of the issue. When whites use the word in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment. It is similar to praising a female executive or politician by calling her “tough” or “a rational decision-maker.”

“When people say it, what they are really saying is that someone is articulate ... for a black person,” Ms. Perez said.

by HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.
Published: November 18, 2007

The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn’t in income, but in wealth. According to a study by the economist Edward N. Wolff, the median net worth of non-Hispanic black households in 2004 was only $11,800 — less than 10 percent that of non-Hispanic white households, $118,300. Perhaps a bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty — one floated during the Civil War but never fully put into practice — would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners. Sadly, in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle, an enormous number of houses are being repossessed. But for the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society.

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can’t black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

February 2005 | The Walrus Volume 2, Issue 1.| by Lawrence Hill

JANUARY 3, 2005 | WSJ | By AMY L. WAX

Thomas Sowell: Crippled by Their Culture
THE GAP

Race doesn't hold back America's "black rednecks." Nor does racism.

The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, April 26, 2005

By ADAM BRYANT
Published: November 12, 201

NOVEMBER 7, 2011 | WSJ | By LAUREN WEBER.

Rev. Al Sharpton Friday, December 27, 2002

These rappers and "hip-hop impresarios" weren't worried about unemployment or the financial conditions of those who support their records and made them stars. They weren't worried about the education system that keeps too many of their fans and families in poverty. They weren't worried about voting rights. They didn't have any conferences on any of that. There wasn't one seminar entitled "Economic Empowerment" or "Jobs for the 21st Century."...Unfortunately, much of what they're selling is a fraud. They spew hedonism, misogyny, and self-hate. They glorify the prison culture, the pimp culture, and drug culture. They tell the young that they're not worthy unless they're "rocking" Chanel, Gucci, or wearing platinum and diamonds. Not only is this message immoral, but it is also flawed. It's a lie.

The most ludicrous thing in the world is to see a former rapper walking around Broadway with gold teeth and a tarnished ring, his career is gone and he has nothing else. That's how most of these stories end, but nobody is rapping or singing about that.

These artists get huge advances from the record labels, and the first thing they do is run out and buy a big, fancy car. They buy, buy, buy what they wanty, and beg for what they need, and end up with nothing. I think that projecting these images to young people - the bling-bling and the showpieces - and not talking about real estate and land and the fundamental things in life, is almost criminal. These so-called artists are leading our youth down a road that will ultimately lead to their destruction.

APRIL 12, 2007 | WSJ | By LIONEL TIGER.

The coercive trend is that ordinary African-American males earn decreasing amounts of money compared to women of their community. They are more accident-prone, more imprisoned and have frailer family lives than women do. Is this why they smoothly call them whores, out of desperate resentment at their own ineffectuality?

There are structural reasons for this beyond the craven crumminess of popular culture. When African and Arab slavers captured people for the New World, they preferred to break up families. Subsequent slave-owning policies sustained that pattern. As well, many slaves were taken from West African societies in which biological mothers and fathers didn't necessary share child caretaking but mother and her brother did. When I lived in Ghana years ago, Christian families with father and mother in the household were called "same muddah same fadduh" in the street. It's likely that continuities persist, as they certainly do in Caribbean societies.

There's also a massive contemporary reason for the invidiousness many African-American men feel in the presence of women -- their relative failure in a school system which broadly favors females. By college age, there is a sharp fall-off of male enrollment in general and of African-American men specifically.

APRIL 23, 2003|WSJ|By NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN.
HER DREAM OF DREAMS

By Beverly Lowry
(Knopf, 481 pages, $27.50)

To appreciate Madam Walker's accomplishments, you have to know what she was up against. The barriers of sex, tough as they were, do not compare with those of race. Post-slavery America, Madam's America, was a society of unremitting violence toward black people. Readers will learn, for instance, that when toting up the annual white-on-black killing statistics, the statisticians of the time paused to ponder whether a man who had a heart attack running from the dogs set on him belonged in the lynched, murdered or accidental-death column.

APRIL 28, 2005 | WSJ | MARTHA BAYLES

At any rate, if rap is praised as an attack on the family, then feminist critics are not going to find many allies in either the white or the black mainstream. Yet interestingly, antifamily sentiment was not the dominant message of the conference. That message was articulated by Rachel Raimist, a Minnesota-based filmmaker, who said: "I've worked in the rap industry. I love hip hop. But when my seven-year-old daughter gets up and says, 'Shake it,' I realize something is wrong."

December 3, 2006 | NYT | By JONATHAN D. GLATER.

Oct 27 2011

Gardner, SandraView Profile. The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education18. 7 (Jan 7, 2008): 22-25.

Sergio posted to Things That Make You Go Hmm... at 9:56 pm on April 20, 2011

Whatever happened to Tracy Camilla Johns?

October 10, 2011 | Your Black Politics: | by Dr. Boyce Watkins,Syracuse University.

By: Valerie Gladstone
Posted: October 11, 2011 at 12:59 AM

By: The Root Staff | Posted: October 6, 2011

A Pittsburgh native, Bell distinguished himself early in his law career through his work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund during the civil rights era. Recruited by Thurgood Marshall, Bell oversaw 300 school-desegregation cases, according to The HistoryMakers. He also served as deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He was known as a pioneer of the study of "critical race theory," which explores racism in laws and legal institutions.

According to his bio at The HistoryMakers:

In 1971, Bell became the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. There, he established a course in civil rights law and wrote Race, Racism and American Law, which today is a standard textbook in law schools around the country. Leaving Harvard, Bell became the first African American dean of the University of Oregon Law School, and in 1985, he resigned in protest after the university directed him not to hire an Asian American candidate for a faculty position. Returning to Harvard Law School, Bell would again resign in protest in 1992 over the school's failure to hire and offer tenure to minority women.

By: Linda Heywood and John Thornton | Posted: October 1, 2011

By: Linda Heywood and John Thornton
Posted: October 1, 2011 at

Arem Duplessis
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
Published: September 22, 2011

One of his goals, Touré writes in “Who’s Afraid of Post-­Blackness? What
It Means to Be Black Now,” is “to attack and destroy the idea that
there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Post-blackness
has no patience with “self-appointed identity cops” and their “cultural
bullying.” ...What this malleability means, ... is a liberating pursuit
of individuality...Post-black identity, we learn, resides in the need
to live with and transcend new and subtle but pervasive forms of racism:
“Post-black does not mean ‘post-racial.’

September 16, 2011 | NYT | By IMANI PERRY

"...The impediments to marriage for black people are daunting and
multifaceted.

Black women significantly outperform black men in high school and
college. As a result, the black middle class is disproportionately
female and the black poor are disproportionately male, and the gap is
widening. Extraordinary rates of incarceration for black men, and the
long-term effects of a prison record on employment, exacerbate this
situation. Banks refers to studies indicating that “in evaluating
potential mates, economic stability still matters more for
African-Americans than for other groups.” Yet they may never find that
security, and therefore never marry.

Moreover, the benefits of marriage don’t accrue as readily for
African-Americans as for other groups precisely because of their
economic instability."

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: September 15, 2011