If Young People Don’t Wake Up Before The November Election: “Change” Is Dead In the Water

special to NewBlackMan

If Young People Don’t Wake Up Before The November Election:
“Change” Is Dead In the Water
by Mark Naison

One of the most amazing things about Barack Obama’s improbable run to the Presidency was the role of young people in energizing his campaign and persuading their skeptical elders that Obama was the best candidate in the field

I was one of those skeptics. So convinced was I that Barack Obama could never win a Presidential election that I supported an effort to draft Al Gore as the Democratic Presidential nominee and actually printed up stickers that said, Gore/Obama in 2008. My colleagues, most of them African American, were equally wary of an Obama nomination, fearful that it might bring a powerful undercurrent of white racism to the surface with a new intensity.

It was my students, and former students, most of them white and female, who convinced me, not only that Obama was the best candidate in the field, but that he could win, because he had inspired a wave of youthful idealism that I had not seen since the 60’s. These young women didn’t reach me primarily with their arguments, but with their passion and hard work. They were tireless in convincing their parents, classmates and neighbors to vote for Barack Obama, putting their friendships and family ties on the line to bring a great new day in the nation that would end the embarrassment of the Bush years and make America respected once again among the nations of the world.

This passion carried through the primaries and the general election, moving a mountain once thought unbridgeable in American politics and led to the election of our first Black president. I still remember the call I got from my former student Jenn Watts, who in her mid twenties was placed in charge of organizing Southern Indiana for the Obama campaign, telling me “ Dr Naison, we are going to paint this red state blue” and didn’t you know it, Indiana went for Obama by a small margin

Now, two years later, I wonder of that explosion of youth activism was a dream. With critical mid term elections coming up in November, what I get from the young people in my circle is indifference and apathy. Not one of my students or former students has sent a message to my email list urging them to vote in November. Not one has posted a message on Facebook pointing out the powerful issues at stake in the coming elections. Not one has handed me campaign literature, asked me to donate money to a candidate, or even brought the elections up as a subject worth discussing.

To me, given the issues at stake in the November election, this is both disturbing and astonishing. If young people voted for “Change” in 2008, what they are going to assure, by not voting in 2010, is complete Political Gridlock.

If Republicans win control of Congress in 2010, here is what it is likely to mean:

*No major investments in infrastructure repairs

*No national commitment to developing alternative energy sources or providing incentives to drivers, homeowners and businesses to become more energy efficient

*No construction of a high speed rail system comparable to those that exist in Europe and Asia

*An end to unemployment benefits for people experiencing long term joblessness

*No pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, even those who have been working and paying taxes for years

*No expansion of rights for gay workers and families

To put the issue more bluntly, the Obama administration, in its first two years, helped prevent a Depression, and created a health care plan which began to extend coverage to the nation’s more than 45 million uninsured people. What it was not able to do was begin to modernize the nation’s roads, rails and electrical grid, and make the investments in wind and solar energy necessary to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and retard Global Warming.

These are precisely the programs that are needed if our economy is going to be able to compete with other advanced nations and if we are going to be able to maintain our standard of living without putting intolerable pressure on the world’s resources.

In short, what is at stake in November is precisely the issues that young people ought to be getting excited about, as it is THEIR futures that are going to be compromised if progressive infrastructure policies, environmental policies, immigration policies and human rights policies are not introduced

So my students and former students, it’s time to get the fever for change back and make sure you vote in the November elections.

You still have a month left. The game isn’t over

Get off your butts and get everyone you know to join you at the polls.

The future you save may be your own.

***

Mark Naison is a political activist who was a member of CORE and SDS in the 1960s. He is a graduate of Columbia University and holds a Ph. D. in American History. Naison is a professor at Fordham University in New York. He is the author of 'White Boy, A Memoir'.

Foreclosure Crisis Intensified Among Blacks: Study

from The Huffington Post

Foreclosure Crisis Intensified Among Blacks: Study
by William Alden

African Americans have suffered disproportionately from foreclosures due to racially discriminatory lending practices, a new study shows.

The study, authored by Douglas Massey and Jacob Rugh of Princeton, looks at racially segregated neighborhoods, where the percentage of minorities (particularly blacks, Hispanics and Asians) is higher than in the country as a whole. Using a black "dissimilarity index" to measure how a region's African-American makeup differs from the national percentage, the authors found that one standard deviation increase in this index -- when a community is slightly blacker than the nation as a whole -- increases the number of foreclosures by 15,028 and the foreclosure rate by 1.68 percentage points. As Salmon points out, that's quite high, given that the nation's foreclosure rate is 4.14 percent.

Before the housing bubble burst, blacks were more likely than their white counterparts to be given "subprime" loans, with high (or increasing) interest rates and hidden fees. It's a practice often referred to as "predatory lending." As Reuters notes, blacks with similar credit scores to whites were given worse deals on their loans, suggesting that race played a role in the way some lenders structured these deals.

Among lenders that went bankrupt in 2007, blacks were three times more likely than whites to receive subprime loans, according to a previous study that the authors cite in their report. Among lenders that did not go bankrupt, blacks were equally as likely as whites to receive "predatory" treatment.

The structures of these subprime mortgages made default especially likely, contributing in large part to the housing market meltdown that led to the financial crisis. But lenders didn't have to worry about the risk of default: With the rise of mortgage securitization in the 1980s, lenders could originate loans and sell them off to banks, which repackaged them and sold them to investors. The popularity of mortgage-backed derivatives, especially collateralized debt obligations, in the years leading up to the crisis created a huge demand for subprime, high-yield bonds -- which in turn encouraged some lenders to engage in ever riskier practices.

Racial segregation concentrated and intensified the fallout from racially motivated lending practices, the study says. It also facilitated the lending in the first place, since lenders could target communities that they knew to be disproportionately black or Hispanic.

"Hispanic and black home owners, not to mention entire Hispanic and black neighborhoods, bore the brunt of the foreclosure crisis," the study says. The authors say the nation's civil rights legislation must be amended to include more effective mechanisms for enforcement.

Read Study Here

'Left of Black': Episode #3 featuring Salamishah Tillet and David Ikard

Host Mark Anthony Neal Discusses Sexual Predators with University of Pennsylvania Professor Salamishah Tillet & Florida State University Professor David Ikard.

Professor Tillet is Founder of A Long Walk Home, a non-profit organization that uses art therapy and the visual and performance arts to document, to educate and to bring about social change.

Professor Ikard is the author of Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism.

Does Conscious Music Still Matter? John Legend and the Roots

Has Conscious Black music gotten more of a voice in the Obama era?

'How We Got Over?': John Legend and The Roots Look Back
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

As the myth goes, Clara Ward, one of the most influential Gospel singers of the 20th Century, wrote the song “How I Got Over” after a racist incident in the deep South. The Clara Ward singers were driving down South when their Cadillac was surrounded by a group of White men, upset that a group of Black women were driving in such a fine car. Supposedly Ward feigned being possessed by the devil and the men ran off. The subsequent song “How I Got Over,” which was later popularized by Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin, and recently invoked by The Roots, is not only a testament to “God’s deliverance,” but also a tribute to African-American ingenuity in the face of danger and trauma.

Ward knew, as well as anyone, that the song’s title tapped into the spirit of improvisation that manifested itself in the everyday survival skills of African-Americans, and it was the music that animated both that creative spirit and the will for freedom that marked earlier generations of Black culture. Conventional wisdom suggest that the irrepressible spirit that help Blacks transcend From Slavery to Freedom, to invoke the late great historian John Hope Franklin, is not present among this generation of artists and creative intellectuals. Wake Up! by John Legend & the Roots, suggest the error of conventional wisdom.

The thing that is perhaps most striking about Wake Up! is that it was even made; prior to Barack Obama election it’s easy to imagine record labels frowning on such project, particularly for artists who already presented a mainstream marketing challenge because of their “conscious” personas. It’s a different story in 2010 and what the Obama era has meant for many recording artists, is the total collapse of the music industry’s most recent business model. While the industry tries to chart an exit strategy (perhaps mirroring the Obama administration), some artists are suddenly finding the freedom to just simply get back to the music. Longtime Public Enemy front-man Chuck D, for example, recently suggested that conditions for recording artists are the best they have been in more than a generation.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides

Do schools care more about racism than homophobia?

Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides
by Keli Goff

There’s a famous story in the Goff household about my mom’s first week back in school shortly after it was integrated. There was a boy who apparently wasn’t a fan of the progress our country was making and decided to take it out on my mom by shouting the N-word at her repeatedly, every single day. For days mom turned the other cheek, so to speak, but on the fifth day she declared loud enough for everyone to hear, that she was going to beat the stuffing out of the guy. Now anyone who knows my mother knows that she would have, had the principal, who was white, not stepped in and warned Mr. Bully that if he didn’t leave her alone she would have the principal’s permission to hit him and would also be kicked out of school.

That was the end of Mr. Bully.

Most of us believe that the kind of prejudice my mom faced is a thing of the past. The thinking goes, “sure prejudice exists but it’s more subtle” or as an older family friend once said, “people no longer spit in your face but in your food.”

But in recent days we’ve all been reminded that this is not true and that the kind of prejudice and open hostility my mom faced fifty years ago is still alive and well in America’s schools.

In recent weeks Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi and Raymond Chase killed themselves. While we are still awaiting key details in some of the cases, we do know this: All of the boys either self-identified as gay or their classmates believed that they were. Billy Lucas was 15 years old, while Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were just thirteen years old yet they faced constantly bullying, ranging from verbal to physical, at the hands of classmates for their perceived sexual orientation. In the case of Tyler Clementi, the college freshman is believed to have jumped from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate allegedly tweeted, then recorded and broadcast an intimate encounter Tyler had with another man.

Sadly these are not the first instances of this type of bullying resulting in death. Last year the suicide of 11-year old Carl Walker made national headlines when he hung himself after being teased relentlessly by classmates who accused him of being gay.

Let me ask you a question. If a young student was called the N-word every day for weeks or months on end, and after repeated cries for help finally took his own life, how quickly do you think citizens of all races would take to the streets to protest? Or better yet how quickly would Al Sharpton and co. demand accountability from the school, and elected officials under the threat of casting the kind of media spotlight that people like Don Imus have nightmares about?

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

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Keli Goff is a political blogger for TheLoop21.com. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic Books, March 2008).

Timberlake and Fallon's 'History of Rap': Hip-Hop Appreciation or 'Blackface' Minstrelsy?

To Spank or Not to Spank? A Black Parents' Dilemma

Should spanking be a last resort or first line of defense?

Whup that Ass? To Spank or Not to Spank
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

Recently, journalist Roland Martin and writer and critic Toure engaged in a spirited exchange on Twitter about spanking. It was pleasing to see two Black man talking publicly about the travails of parenting. Spanking though, is a subject that often transcends simple discussions about parenting, leading into the realm of physical abuse. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t regularly conflicted about when to spank or not, or whether spanking is appropriate at all.

Cards on the table, my mother used to whup my ass. My mother was the proverbial yeller and beater and I can’t say that my mother’s disciplinary skills ever served as a deterrent to my behavior, which was more along the lines of “stupid shit” rather than innate evil. My father on the other hand only spanked me once to my recollection.

The most memorable occasions associated with my parents’ discipline were times when they didn’t spank, like when my father purposely slapped a wall about 6 inches from my head as a teen-ager or when my mother showed up at a touch football game when I was ten, belt in hand, looking for me. Knowing that I should have been the house before dark, I took an alternative route back to the apartment. The subsequent embarrassment I experienced at the constant retelling by my peers of the incident was enough of a future deterrent.

Black parents have long been conflicted about spanking, if only because of the violence that was so often directed at Black bodies during slavery and after. During the era of legal segregation, Black parents often had to aggressively discipline their children so that their children would never fail to remember the unspoken rules of survival in a racist society, particularly in the South. In other words, Black parents had to lovingly “beat that ass” to make sure their sons, for example, didn’t engage in dangerous acts, such as reckless eyeballing (looking at White folk directly in their eyes), that could get them killed. As such, spanking has become part of the fabric of some Black communities.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21