Links:The Black Star Project's website:
Black Star Journal:
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12 killed, at least 74 wounded in violent Chicago holiday weekend
Top Cop Boast A Decline in Violence
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Young women watch as police prepare to remove the remains of their friend after he was shot and killed on June 22, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. Two others were wounded in the shooting. There have been at least 29 homicides in Chicago during the first three weeks of June. More than 160 people have been shot and wounded in the city during the same period. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
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By Renita D. Young
July 6, 2013
CHICAGO-The nation's third-largest city reached a new high over the extended holiday weekend as its top cop continues to boast an overall decline in violence.
Between Wednesday and Sunday, 12 victims were killed in shootings and at least 74 were shot in attacks across the city, including a 5-year-old boy who was wounded early Friday morning, and a separate police-involved fatality according to the Chicago Police Department.
"While to date we've had significantly fewer shootings and significantly fewer murders this year, there's more work to be done and we won't rest until everyone in Chicago enjoys the same sense of safety," Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said in a statement.
The Cook County Medical Examiners office said that "it's been an extremely busy weekend," with the first fatality occurring Wednesday afternoon when 26-year-old William Jones was shot dead while sitting in a car on the South Side of the city, Chicago Police News Affairs said. The shooter is still at large.
As police scattered across the city to contain weekend violence, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition kicked off its 42nd annual convention, in which hip-hop artists Lupe Fiasco and Waka Flocka Flame spoke on a panel that addressed music and its role in influencing violence. "It doesn't [influence violence]," said the Chicago-born rapper Fiasco. "It's 50/50; my fifty is what I make and what I give you is all up to you. The other 50 is how you choose to use it. I can't control what the reactions are going to be. I can't control how you're going to take it," he said.
Waka Floka, who grew up in New York, told theGrio that he doesn't feel personally responsible for any violence that may happen as a result of his lyrics. "That's the parents' job," he said, to make sure music doesn't negatively influence kids. "I use my music to express myself. I am a man of action and I feel like a lot of things I put into words, because I can't put them into actions because of the consequences," he said.
Renita D. Young is a Chicago-based multimedia journalist.
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Study: Black man without felony and white felon - same chances for hire
Devah Pager
Princeton University
August 9, 2008
Is racial discrimination a thing of the past?
Debates about the relevance of discrimination in today's society have been difficult to resolve, in part because of the challenges in identifying, measuring, and documenting its presence or absence in all but extreme cases. Discrimination is rarely something that can be observed explicitly.
To address these issues, I recently conducted a series of experiments investigating employment discrimination. In these experiments, which took place in Milwaukee and New York City, I hired young men to pose as job applicants, assigning them resumes with equal levels of education and experience, and sending them to apply for real entry-level job openings all over the city.
Team members also alternated presenting information about a fictitious criminal record (a drug felony), which they "fessed up to" on the application form. During nearly a year of fieldwork, teams of testers audited hundreds of employers, applying for a wide range of entry level jobs such as waiters, sales assistants, laborers, warehouse workers, couriers, and customer service representatives.
The results of these studies were startling. Among those with no criminal record, white applicants were more than twice as likely to receive a callback relative to equally qualified black applicants. Even more troubling, whites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better, than a black applicant with a clean background.
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Black males from across the U.S. unite
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BLACK MALE HIGH SCHOOL graduates from several states descended on the Chicago State University campus recently to participate in what was called the largest mass Black male graduation ceremony. Graduates waited patiently to cross the stage at the ceremony acknowledging their achievements and receive a $100 check.
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By Andrea Watson
July 6, 2013
Nearly 200 Black male high school graduates from across the country gathered at Chicago State University last Saturday to walk the stage again, but this time in unity. The Black Star Project, a Chicago-based educational non-profit, partnered with the university to host the mass graduation, June 29. The "Transition to Manhood" ceremony brought together about 40 distinguished Black leaders to witness the number of Black male youth transitioning to men.
Aldermen, retired senators, CEO's, police officers, attorneys and other luminaries attended. The goal was to connect the teens with leaders who could become potential mentors. "Unlike a lot of other universities, it's a center that's dedicated and put in place to help young men navigate the terrain of higher education so they don't get the call back home saying, 'Mama, daddy I slipped up,' said the director of Chicago State's African American Male Resource Center, Kwesi Harris.
He said he was very pleased to see so many graduates. "Instead of young men on the block with Glocks, these are young men who went to school with books," he said. Chicago State accepts incoming students until the first day of classes, he said. Perhaps the best part of the program was the keynote from Lupe Fiasco-someone the young men could relate to.
He awarded them $100 checks. "Congratulations, you have graduated from one of the most terrible substandard school systems in the entire world," he said. "You have just spent the last 12 years receiving one of the worse educations on earth. You're at least four or five steps behind people in other countries that are younger than you. The reason your education was so bad, specifically for you is because it wasn't meant for you. You were never supposed to have it in the first place," Fiasco added.
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UN-COMMON CORE: THE CONTINUED MIS-EDUCATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS
By Dr. Donald H. Smith and Dr. Sam Anderson
JUNE 18,2013
Common Core State Standards created by the Council of State School Officers and the National Governors Association are inadequate for all American school children. Now adopted by 45 states, the District of Columbia and four territories, the Standards are demeaning and particularly unacceptable for students of African descent.
While there is presently considerable dissent among states, parents, educators and even students, with regard to the suitability of the standards for all students, those states which reverse their adoption of the Standards risk their eligibility for Race to the Top funds. Yet, in spite of pressure from the White House for national acceptance of the Standards, the State of New York Assembly and Senate, for example, have recently introduced a bill to "discontinue implementation of the Common Core State Standards".
In the interest of students of color, it is important that Black and Latino legislators support the bill to end the government required Common Core State Standards in New York State.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Ph.D. Harvard, wrote in his classic book, The Mis-education of the Negro (1933), that education in America was intended purposefully to make people of African descent feel inferior and people of European descent appear superior. That white supremacist purpose was then and is now still manifested in teacher training, in curriculum, in instruction, in books, newspapers, broadcasting, films and, most importantly, in public discourse, philosophy and institutionalized in public policy.
No other culture came to America in chains to be eradicated or suppressed and vilified by Americans of European descent who have historically and presently been accorded unearned special privileges because of their skin color and heritage (despite the class differences among them).
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WECAN teaches youth
careers in the arts
Poetry - Film - Dance - Music
Auditions Held
Friday, July 5, 2013 - 12:00 noon to 3:00 pm
Saturday, July 6, 2013 - 12:00 noon to 3:00 pm
Auditions held at
6460 South Stony Island
Chicago, Illinois
This summer program is FREE!!! - Six weeks of intensive career arts training. Please call 773.288.3000 for more information.
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Summer Saturday University
This summer, ensure that your children excel in their learning at a Saturday University. Saturday University is one of the newest and most effective educational concepts in America for educating students of color. It is family- and community-driven education at its best. As many/most Black children in American schools are failing academically, the only way to successfully educate them is with the support and actions of their parents, families and communities. Register now for one of our 20 free Chicago-area Saturday Universities beginning now.
Please Call 773.285.9600 to register.
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What to the Slave
is the Fourth of July?
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
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