Monthly Archives: December 2012

The Christmas opening of Academy Award winner, Jamie Foxx’s, new motion picture, Django, has all of America talking. That could be a good thing, if we were talking about something serious. But we’re not. We’re talking about a movie of something serious. Black America been waiting a looonngg time to talk about slavery. White America? Not so much. Slavery is America’s biggest curse, and its deepest scar. The daily reminder of America’s indictment in what many call, “the African Holocaust,” is the 40 million American born African descendants of those enslaved from as early as 1555 (though America claims it … Continue reading →

The events of the past week have been horrifying and gut wrenching. Unimaginable as it was, it was a pathology society has come to accept. A toxic mix of accepted (and benign) anti-social behavior, mental illness and guns has taken America by storm, once again. The tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a troubled youth, possibly with mental health issues, with access to a military assault weaponry collection, who kills his mother (who owned the collection and taught her son to shoot guns)—twenty first graders—six school employees—and finally himself, should be a once in a generation anomaly.  But it … Continue reading →

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to finally hear cases on America’s emerging cultural shift, gay (or same sex) marriage puts America, front and center, in the dominant culture shift of the day. After a decade of state initiated attempts to mainstream gay marriage were confronted with legal and cultural challenges, and years after the federal government passed a law (Defense of Marriage Act) defining marriage as between a man and a woman, the courts will decide if culture trumps law. The Court will take up the California case (the validity of Proposition 8) and the validity of the Defense of … Continue reading →

I finally got a chance to see a documentary this weekend that I actually had a chance to host (but it was the weekend before the election and we had a Urban Issues Forum scheduled already). It is one of the most powerful untold stories of the 20th Century. There are things that happen to us in society that have nothing to do with us, nor does it happen of our own volition. It just happens and the world spins out of control from there. This is what happened to five black and Latino teenagers in New York, in 1989, … Continue reading →

Efforts of the part of the Republican Party to block the possible nomination of United Nations Ambassador, Susan Rice, to replace Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State, has taken an all too familiar turn in American history. Similar to the symbolic actions taken in 1956, when the Supreme Court order school desegregation, “With All Deliberate Speed,” the House Republicans…lame duck House Republicans, mind out, have sought to take a meaningless stand in the debate around who will be the next lead diplomat for the United States. Ambassador Rice has come under fire for her real time briefing of the situation … Continue reading →