Jim Crow 2.0

Affirmative action has been part of our social and political landscape for over fifty years now, ever since JFK signed an executive order in 1961 that called for  "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." Four years later, President Johnson took it even further when he stated:

Nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own destiny than the revolution of the Negro American…In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope…But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair…This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result…To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough.

So here we are, trudging through another presidential election cycle, and as always, Republicans have begun to talk about the inequality of affirmative action. They call it “preferential treatment.” They inspire students to sue colleges over it. They claim that it’s no longer necessary in an America willing to elect a black president. They say that the United States can never be a country based on equality as long as we continue to offer a leg up to a part of our population.They’re right!
Read the rest of the story on The Urban Twist.

soular eclipse

soular eclipse

can your eyes not see the tragedy that my eyes see or are they too caught up in your tv's, your dvd's, your psp's, your facebookies & your i-phoneys that they are blind to what surrounds you, or are you just too afraid of the truth you'll see? our metropolis dreams turned necropolis screams, where the dead prowl the streets scavenging for bits of eat, blowing gravel off our half-chewed gutter discards, drinking that flat backwash contaminated splash of tepid pisswater we tossed into that trashcan, numbing their minds with that poison they buy with the few pennies we provide if only they will hide again from our sullied sights, retreat to their cardboard palaces, their city heated steam vents, their billboard park benches coated in newspaper they can't even read; where the dying left behind child runs wild on our meanest streets spying for his dope and gun slinging paper heroes, fouling out on concrete coated rock courts, holy grail blazing a path he hopes leads to our white castles that ignore his plight, not knowing that he is in a labyrinth leading only into the very walls that separate the dying from the dead he will join in his ghetto mausoleum without our hands to pull him free; where the falling fall for the freedom they sought for themselves, freedom now forced & foisted upon foreigners too afraid to fight for or find for themselves, our young falling for lies of free rides to higher education & higher living when their only guarantee is a free ride as air freight in flag-draped corpse boxes back home where they can be forever free to rot under our feet! can your eyes not see? or are you too afraid to stare at the eclipse too long, afraid that your eyes will melt in the bright white hot glowing pain shining through our soul shadows, blocking our sons, our daughters, our fathers & mothers, sisters & brothers, dead & dying as we reap & eat the fruit that grows from the slow flowing clots of their blood?

Look!
Open your eyes & see.
If you do go blind, you go blind with me.
Otherwise, ignore the plight;
& in the end
we
all
lose
sight.

The Speech

I pulled this off HuffingtonPost. I don't know about you, but for me this excerpt sums-up exactly what I want (¡and don't want!) out of government—the type of government that helped me get to where I am today. Barack Obama delivered the speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois in June, 2005.

Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn't much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government--divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it--Social Darwinism--every man or woman for him or herself. It's a tempting idea, because it doesn't require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford--tough luck...It let's us say to the child who was born into poverty--pull yourself up by your bootstraps...

But there is a problem. It won't work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it's been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It's been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity.

¿So what do you think? ¿Do you disagree? ¿If so, how do you think government should work? & if you do agree—well maybe you should spread the word...