Wednesday, July 29, 2009

"DO YOU LOVE ME?"

New flava in ya ear!

MSTRKRFT feat. John Legend.

Heartbreaker
.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Bones, Ribs, Coolers, and Beer.

FILE UNDER: Old school funk for the true funk soldiers/This is how we do it!

As the days get long, and we see a rise in temperatures, how many bitches want to touch this n****a name Snoo- ah hem, I mean we should take the time to relax the mind, let the conscious be free, and indulge in the tunes best fit for chilling, dranking, and in the words of Magic Johnson, "having a good time..."


Ain't that right Andre 3000?

Big Pimpin'.

Spending cheese, Shakin' em off.

Mariah Carey.

Gucci Mane.


Obsessed.


The Remix.

Disturbia.



Words. For Your Consideration.

"The clash in Cambridge about ID and racial profiling, about identity and expectation and respect was just a snippet of our culture’s ongoing meta-narrative about race. Its major themes played through the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor, and showed up , last week, when Barack Obama, speaking for once not as the apotheosis of “post-racial” America but instead as a man who’s spent nearly 48 years Living While Black, was labeled “unpresidential.” Each chapter in this larger story shows us, time and again, what Sotomayor’s critics refused to concede: that how we all think, what we see, how we reason and react are directly determined by who we are. And some of who we are is conditioned by our race.

Had Gates been a white man, approached in his home and abruptly told to step outside, he might well have bristled at the cold officiousness of the officer’s tone, but he probably wouldn’t have thought, or known, that to leave the haven of his house would expose him to the possibility of sudden arrest.

Had he been white, a request for ID would probably not have sounded like an insult, or worse, a potential danger. It would probably not have stirred up memories of black men like Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who in 1999 was killed by police in the Bronx as he reached for his wallet. He very likely would not have seen what Gates was sure he saw in Crowley’s face, as the cop scanned the professor’s Harvard ID, trying to take in the fact that the man before him was not an intruder. “He’s trying to unpack a narrative … He was so sure that he had a catch,” Gates recalled to King. “That is when everything turned.”

We don’t know precisely what was going through Crowley’s mind. But his report and later statements seem to attest to a greatly outsized sense of vulnerability and victimization.

...Obama warned that for America to move forward, both blacks and whites need to listen to each other’s narratives, and stop reflexively dismissing them either as paranoia or simple prejudice.

The “He said/He said” of Ware Street in Cambridge might be just the place to start."

  • THE NEW YORK TIMES: A Lot Said, and Unsaid, About Race
  • Sunday, July 26, 2009

    Can't Stop, Won't Stop.

    "Come catch my Disease" with Soulja Boy and his,

    Swag Flu.

    Kick, Push.

    A Moment of Clarity.



    Words.

    "What is the future of group preferences in America?

    ...this preoccupation with preferences may be a fool's errand. With black youths performing worse on the SAT in 2000 than in 1990, the obsession with affirmative action may only help us avoid the more troubling reality: the ongoing underdevelopment that keeps so many blacks non-competitive.

    ...Affirmative action has always been more about the restoration of legitimacy to American institutions than the uplift of blacks and other minorities. For 30 years after its inception, no one even bothered to measure its effectiveness in minority progress. Advocates of racial preferences tried to prove that these policies actually helped minorities only after 1996, when California's Proposition 209 banned racial preferences in all state institutions, scaring supporters across the country.

    But the research following from this scare has been politicized and discredited. Most important, it has completely failed to show that affirmative action ever closes the academic gap between minorities and whites. And failing in this, affirmative action also fails to help blacks achieve true equality with whites -- the ultimate measure of which is parity in skills and individual competence. Without this underlying parity there can never be true equality in employment, income levels, rates of home ownership, educational achievement and the rest.

    ...how long will minorities need some form of racial preferences? -- is the wrong question. A better question is: How long it will take American institutions to feel legitimate without granting racial preferences?

    ...Disparate impact and racial preferences represent the law and policymaking of a guilty America, an America lacking the moral authority to live by the rigors of the Constitution's "equal protection" -- a guarantee that sees victims as individuals and requires hard evidence to prove discrimination. They are "white guilt" legalisms created after the '60s as fast tracks to moral authority. They apologize for presumed white wrongdoing and offer recompense to minorities before any actual discrimination has been documented. Yet these legalisms are much with us now. And it will no doubt take the courts a generation or more to disentangle all this apology from the law.

    But fortunately race relations in America are not much driven by the courts. We argue over affirmative action and disparate impact because we don't know how to talk about our most profound racial problem: the lack of developmental parity between blacks and whites. Today a certain contradiction runs through black American life. As many of us still suffer from deprivations caused by historical racism, we also live in a society where racism is simply no longer a significant barrier to black advancement -- a society so sensitized that even the implication of racism, as in the Henry Louis Gates case, triggers a national discussion.

    We blacks know oppression well, but today it is our inexperience with freedom that holds us back almost as relentlessly as oppression once did. Out of this inexperience, for example, we miss the fact that racial preferences and disparate impact can only help us -- even if they were effective -- with a problem we no longer have. The problem that black firefighters had in New Haven was not discrimination; it was the fact that not a single black did well enough on the exam to gain promotion.

    Today's "black" problem is underdevelopment, not discrimination. Success in modernity will demand profound cultural changes -- changes in child-rearing, a restoration of marriage and family, a focus on academic rigor, a greater appreciation of entrepreneurialism and an embrace of individual development as the best road to group development.

    ...continuing black underdevelopment will flush both races out of their postures and make most discussions of race in America, outside a context of development, irrelevant."

  • THE WASHINGTON POST: Affirmative Action Is Just a Distraction
  • D.O.A.


    Pause.

    Words. For Your Consideration...

    "Affirmative action, age 45, is dead.

    In 2003, after the Supreme Court limited race to one of many factors that could be considered in school admissions, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor predicted that affirmative action, born with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had at most 25 more years to live. She was too optimistic.

    ...Without protection from reverse-discrimination lawsuits, virtually every instance of affirmative action can now be forever tied in a legal tangle that chokes the life out of it.

    ...So, why now? More often than not, it is the American left that gets lost in absurd fantasies about race in this country. They pretend there has been no progress in recent decades, even when they see the rise of a black middle class and witness the election of a mixed-race president and the likely confirmation of a Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court. But today, it is the right wing and its supporters on the high court who are making stuff up. They pretend that the nation is already so transformed that a colorblind America is a reality and that affirmative action is superfluous...

    After the Ricci ruling, President Obama said that any hiring or school admissions practices based solely on race are unconstitutional, and he condemned the use of quotas. In an interview with the Associated Press, the nation's first black president stressed that the Supreme Court did not completely "close the door" on affirmative action, if properly structured and in certain circumstances, but he conceded that the court had moved "the ball" away from such efforts. Obama also asserted that affirmative action "hasn't been as potent a force for racial progress as advocates would claim," and as consolation, he offered that the best form of affirmative action is a good education for all Americans.

    Essentially, Obama delivered a eulogy for affirmative action.

    ...The bold national experiment that came to life 45 years ago with the equal employment section of the Civil Rights Act is now over -- even if discrimination is not.

    It is time to think about how to deal with racial inequity without affirmative action."

  • THE WASHINGTON POST: Affirmative Action's Untimely Obituary


  • EARLIER:

  • HUMAN EVENTS: How to Handle Sonia


  • Wade in the Water.


  • This Can't Be Life.


  • The Final Countdown


  • [Black]Reality Bites.
  • Thursday, July 23, 2009

    Wade in the Water.

    A Moment of Clarity.



    Words.

    "Americans got a rare glimpse Wednesday night of what it means to have a black president in the Oval Office.

    In response to a question at his prime-time news conference about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the black Harvard professor, in his own home over the weekend, Mr. Obama declared that the Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly.”

    Mr. Obama’s response was his most animated performance of the hourlong news conference, and represented an extraordinary plunge by a president into a local law-enforcement dispute. And it opened a window into a world from which Mr. Obama is now largely shielded, suggesting the incident had struck a raw nerve with the president.

    In the public spotlight, Mr. Obama has sought to transcend, if not avoid, the issue of race. As a candidate, he tried to confine his racial references to the difficulty of catching a cab in New York, although he was forced to confront it directly during the Pennsylvania primary when his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, became an issue. And last week, at the 100th convention of the NAACP in New York, he spoke in uncharacteristically personal terms about his rise to power as a black man, while warning black Americans not to make excuses for their failure to achieve.

    Wednesday night’s press conference seemed to be a different deal as the president leaped into a highly charged controversy that has ignited passions across talk radio, the blogosphere and the old-fashioned water cooler.

    But in fact, racial profiling was a major issue for Mr. Obama when he was in the Illinois legislature. He was the chief sponsor of a bill, which became law, that requires police to record the race, age and gender of all drivers they stop for traffic violations and for those records to be analyzed for evidence of racial profiling.

    And so the substance of his response was not as surprising as the fact that a president so quickly joined the fray."

  • THE NEW YORK TIMES: Obama Wades Into a Volatile Racial Issue


  • EARLIER:

  • This Can't Be Life.
  • Wednesday, July 22, 2009

    "Oops Upside Ya Head!"



    I said, "OOPS(!), Upside Ya Head!"

    Tuesday, July 21, 2009

    Poker Face?


    "What, ME worry?"

    Words. For Your Consideration...

    "It was interesting to watch the Republican Party lose touch with America. You had a party led by conservative Southerners who neither understood nor sympathized with moderates or representatives from swing districts.

    They brought in pollsters to their party conferences to persuade their members that the country was fervently behind them. They were supported by their interest groups and cheered on by their activists and the partisan press. They spent federal money in an effort to buy support but ended up disgusting the country instead.

    It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.

    This ideological overreach won’t be any more successful than the last one.

    ...Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Democratic chairmen, but he is not feared.

    ... That leaves matters in the hands of the Blue Dog Democrats. These brave moderates are trying to restrain the fiscal explosion. But moderates inherently lack seniority (they are from swing districts). They are usually bought off by leadership at the end of the day.

    And so here we are again. Every new majority overinterprets its mandate. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again."

  • THE NEW YORK TIMES: Liberal Suicide March
  • This Can't Be Life.

    A "Post-Racial" Moment of Clarity.



    Words. For Your Consideration...

    "Ain’t nothing post-racial about the United States of America.

    I say this because my best friend, a well-known, middle-aged, affluent, black man, was arrested on his own front porch after showing his identification to a white police officer who was responding to a burglary call. Though the officer quickly determined that my friend was the rightful resident of the house and knew by then that there was no burglary in progress, he decided to place my friend in handcuffs, put him in the back of a police cruiser and have him fingerprinted and fully “processed,” at our local police station.

    This did not happen at night. It happened in the middle of the day. It did not happen to a previously unknown urban black male. It happened to internationally known, 58-year-old Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. I am writing about this event because it is an outrage, because I want others to know that it is an outrage, and because, even now, I have not fully processed the meaning of it.

    ...Skip is one of the most readily recognized black men in America and the most broadly influential black scholar of this generation. And yes, in the liberal, politically correct cocoon of “the people’s Republic of Cambridge,” a famous, wealthy and important black man was arrested on his front porch. The ultimate charge? “Disorderly conduct.” Whatever that means.

    ...What I do know with certainty is that the officer, even by his own written report, understood that he was dealing with a lawful resident of the house when he made the arrest. That same report makes it clear that at the time of the arrest, the officer was no longer concerned about the report of a “burglary in progress” involving “two black males.” No, by this point we’re talking about something else entirely."

  • THE ROOT: What Do You Call a Black Man with a Ph.D.?


  • EARLIER:

  • Higher Learning.


  • Hear Me Out.


  • REAL TALK: The "Post-Racial American 'Nation of Cowards' " Edition
  • Monday, July 20, 2009

    Bones, Ribs, Coolers, and Beer.

    FILE UNDER: Old school funk for the true funk soldiers/This is how we do it!

    As the days get long, and we see a rise in temperatures, how many bitches want to touch this n****a name Snoo- ah hem, I mean we should take the time to relax the mind, let the conscious be free, and indulge in the tunes best fit for chilling, dranking, and in the words of Magic Johnson, "having a good time..."


    Ain't that right Usher?

    Oh Word?



    Words. For Your Consideration...

    "Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president's approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to "accomplish too much," and 57 percent think the country is on the "wrong track."

    ...what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt."

    ...Of course, it's too early to write Obama off. Just a few years ago, Republicans and Democrats alike were puzzling over the "permanent" GOP majority. And less than two years ago, the smart set was buying advance tickets for Rudy vs. Hillary. Yet there's no question that Obama's massively ambitious domestic agenda is at a fork in the road: One route leads to Plains, Ga., and early retirement, the other to Hope, Ark., a second term and the revitalization of the American economy.

    ...What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn't get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another.

    ...Bush learned the hard way that running government as a perpetual crisis machine leads to bad policy and public fatigue. Obama's insistence on taking advantage of a crisis to push through every item on the progressive checklist right now is threatening to complete that cycle within his first year.

    ...Americans have a pretty good (if slow-to-activate) B.S. detector, and the more you mislead them now, the worse they'll punish you later. Toward that end, producing real transparency instead of broken promises is the first step toward building credibility.

    ...As a political animal, he has always resembled Clinton more than Carter. This might help him avoid the Carteresque pileup he's driving into. Far more important, it just might help the rest of us."

  • THE WASHINGTON POST: What's Next, Mr. President -- Cardigans?
  • This Modern Love.

    New flava in ya ear!

    Kid Cudi
    feat. Kanye West & Common.

    Make Her Say.

    Sunday, July 19, 2009

    "Dancing, Dancing, DANCING!"

    "He's a Dancing Machine!"...



  • NAH RIGHT: Video: Look At Puff, Now Look At Me…
  • In the Zone.

    The Twilight Zone.

    With the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in,

    Snakesweat.

    Do You Wanna Ride?

    Twista feat. Do Or Die & Johnny P.

    Yo Body.

    The Final Countdown.



    Words.

    "...the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent.

    The hearings were pure “Alice in Wonderland.” Reality was turned upside down. Southern senators who relate every question to race, ethnicity and gender just assumed that their unreconstructed obsessions are America’s and that the country would find them riveting. Instead the country yawned. The Sotomayor questioners also assumed a Hispanic woman, simply for being a Hispanic woman, could be portrayed as The Other and patronized like a greenhorn unfamiliar with How We Do Things Around Here. The senators seemed to have no idea they were describing themselves when they tried to caricature Sotomayor as an overemotional, biased ideologue.

    At least they didn’t refer to “Maria Sotomayor” as had Mike Huckabee, whose sole knowledge of Latinos apparently derives from “West Side Story.” But when Tom Coburn of Oklahoma merrily joked to Sotomayor that “You’ll have lots of ’splainin’ to do,” it clearly didn’t occur to him that such mindless condescension helps explain why the fastest-growing demographic group in the nation is bolting his party.

    ...Among Sotomayor’s questioners, both Coburn and Lindsey Graham are class of ’94. They — along with Jeff Sessions, a former Alabama attorney general best known for his unsuccessful prosecutions of civil rights activists — set the Republicans’ tone last week. In one of his many cringe-inducing moments, Graham suggested to Sotomayor that she had “a temperament problem” and advised that “maybe these hearings are a time for self-reflection.” That’s the crux of the ’94 spirit, even more than its constant, whiny refrain of white victimization: Hold others to a standard that you would not think of enforcing on yourself or your peers. Self-reflection may be mandatory for Sotomayor, but it certainly isn’t for Graham.

    ...You’d think that Coburn’s got some ’splainin’ to do, but as Washington etiquette has it, we spent the week learning every last footnote about Sotomayor while acres of press coverage shed scant light on the shoddy records of those judging her. The public got the point anyway about this dying order and its tired racial and culture wars. With Sotomayor’s fate never in doubt, it changed the channel.

    ...It’s the American way that we judge people as individuals, not as groups. And by that standard we can say unequivocally that this particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past."

  • THE NEW YORK TIMES: They Got Some �Splainin� to Do


  • EARLIER:

  • The White Man's Burden.


  • Justice League: Origins.
  • [Black] Reality Bites.

    A Moment of Clarity.



    Words.

    "President Obama's speech Thursday marking the 100th anniversary of the NAACP's founding was widely reported as a "tough love" message directed at black America. "I've noticed that when I talk about personal responsibility in the African American community, that gets highlighted," Obama said in an interview Friday. "But then the whole other half of the speech, where I talked about government's responsibility . . .that somehow doesn't make news."

    Fair enough, but he misses the point. The real news wasn't in the content but the visuals: the nation's leading black civil rights organization being addressed by the nation's first black president. Obama could have read nursery rhymes and the event still would have been noteworthy.

    In his six months in office, Obama has taken few occasions to confront the issue of race head-on. This moment was inescapable. But his words about the deficits that still plague black America were delivered to a room full of NAACP convention delegates who are, by and large, highly educated and comfortably affluent -- men and women who already have high expectations for their children and know how to hold their elected officials accountable. Missing was the too-large segment of the black community that has been left behind.

    ...there was a time when no one had to ask what the NAACP was supposed to do -- when black Americans, living with the common constraints of overt discrimination, had an obvious and urgent common purpose.

    Said Obama: "I do think it is important for the African American community, in its diversity, to stay true to one core aspect of the African American experience, which is we know what it's like to be on the outside.

    "If we ever lose that, then I think we're in trouble. Then I think we've lost our way." "

  • THE WASHINGTON POST: Black America's New Reality
  • Money Ain't a Thang.

    For now...

    New flava in ya ear!

    Soulja Boy
    .

    Work.