The best antidote to the fear induced, mass amnesia afflicting so many of our brothers and sisters on the far right is truth. So I’ve written a post over at AOL BlackSpin that reminds that Republican presidents have made direct appeals to our nation’s children for help with meeting White House goals. Sure there was push back from Democrats, most notably to the address President Bush gave in October 1991, on the eve of the 1992 presidential campaign. Still, I don’t recall and cannot find any evidence of lefty parents …

Double Click the link to read Paulo Serodio “Africa 102: A more colorful view than black and white”
Since my first post on Paulo Serodio’s lawsuit against the New Jersey Medical School, related to allegations that Serodio was harassed and unfairly suspended for calling himself a “white African American”, the comments section has been very active. The discussion caught Mr. Serodio’s attention and he has submitted the article, that at least a couple of commenters, cited to justify Serodio’s suspension. I appreciate that Mr. Serodio submitted the article here. We …

As a former ABC news investigative journalist, I know that researching one story can lead you to a bigger, more important one. From the comments following the Paulo Serodio post, it appears that the ABC article I referenced in my original post only got a small part of the story.
That is disturbing to me on a profound level.
I have looked everywhere I know to look for the NJMS Plexus article Serodio wrote, that was referenced by a commenter. I would like to read and post Serodio’s article so we …

I cannot give you a short answer about why I call myself black. I guess it has to do with my predominant racial heritage, being born in the 60’s and being a testament to experiencing the world from a particular kind of frame. Overall, I think the common labels we use when discussing amorphous concepts like race, gender, sexuality and attractiveness are uncomfortably constricting and lousy at describing the nuance of human experience.
With this in mind, I was surprised and disappointed by the story of Paulo Serodio. Paulo Serodio …

A white seventh grade Kansas middle school student finds himself punished because of his teacher’s inability to fully explain the horrors of Jim Crow and the deadly history of the domestic terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan.
An Andover family has contacted the Wichita Branch NAACP about a board game created by a Andover seventh-grader that centered on the Ku Klux Klan. Dante and Terica Davis, who are African-American and who filed the complaint, said they’re not against students learning about the KKK.
The offense, Terica Davis said, stems from …

High profile, racially offensive attempts at humor and satire seem to have increased since President Barack Obama became the front-running candidate last summer.
And although the way white artists, satirists and cartoonists have portrayed President and Michelle Obama snatched the most headlines, no racial group is immune from bearing the brunt of cloddish and racially offensive attempts at clever political or social observation.
The most annoying and head shaking aspect of this increasingly apparent pattern, is that once the group which is the subject of the "satire," and its allies, point …

And the original from October…. “McCain on the right, Obama on the left – You can vote however you like…”

My AOL Black Voices/Black Spin editor shot me this eye-opening article he found over at Cognitive Daily. I think you all should know about it. The report details a study which demonstrated that black students who participated in fifteen minute affirmations prior to taking tests, narrowed the "achievement gap" on test results versus their white student counterparts.

At every performance level, this chart (adjusted for covariates) shows that black students who completed the 15-minute affirmation exercise got better grades than students who did not (control). Interestingly, there was no similar effect …

In White Plains, New York a white teacher has apologized for attempting to teach about the horrors of slavery by binding the hands and feet of two black girls. One of the girls had volunteered for the misguided experiment, one had not. Truth is stranger and, at times like this, dumber than fiction. According to WCBS:
Christine Shand says it was a terrible experience for her daughter, Gaby, descended, like most Jamaicans, from slaves.
"She burst into tears, she was crying and she was horrified," Shand told CBS 2 HD.
In a social …

My mother refused to spank me. And by that choice alone, she is a straight up visionary, way ahead of her time as a 19 year old single mother in the early 60’s. What amplifies her smart instincts is the fact that she had spent a formative part of her childhood growing up in the Deep South, during Jim Crow. She watched first hand as black mothers would have to beat their own black sons and daughters in front of white onlookers in order to save their children’s lives.
But when …

It’s a pretty radical proposition to protest the underfunding of inner city schools. But is it a necessary step in the fight for parity?
Please click on over to my post at AOL’s Black Voices/Black Spin blog to read the details and voice your opinion.
Click Here.

I am trying to write tonight, but I am completely distracted, entranced by an HBO documentary that’s on right now called “Resolved.” It looks at some superstars of high school debate competition. But the twist is that one of the teams is a black team who are arguing (debating?) to change the whole way debates are structured. They are challenging that the established and popular, rapid-fire, exhaustive research style of debate is elitist, discriminatory and ultimately useless for real world success.
I don’t want to give too much away, but …

When I talk about our societal obligation to help kids suffering in poor urban and poor rural communities, many conservatives ask me the same question:
Why does government have to get involved?
This question perplexes me because government is already involved in the lives of many of these children; just later on. Government is involved in putting them in prison and housing them in prison. Which you know means our taxes pay to put them in prison and house them in prison. I would rather pay for more and better schools and …

As the presidential candidates clamor for the return of living wage jobs now outsourced to other countries, AT&T seeks to bring back 5,000 customer service jobs from India. And you know what? They are having a hard time finding Americans with the skills and education needed to fill those jobs.
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) – The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the …

Can you hear that low rustling sound? It’s the sound of elementary school teachers all across the nation rummaging through cluttered supply cabinets looking for their staple pocked cartoon-like cutouts of “Great Black Americans” to put on display for the next 28 days or so.

It’s Black History Month again. Children in classrooms everywhere are to be surrounded by two dimensional sepia colored heads, some smiling, some stern faced; all captioned with names like Tubman, King, Carver and Douglass. I guess these displays, along with the requisite school assembly performance …