Motley Moose – Archive

When we celebrate the Brown v Board of Education decision as an historic event-be clear it’s time to demonstrate, not just celebrate where we’ve been.

And don’t think of “the South” when you hear about segregated schools. Let’s take a look at the “apartheid schools” that are not southern.

UCLA Report Finds Changing U.S. Demographics Transform School Segregation Landscape 60 Years After Brown v Board of Education

Brown at 60 shows that the nation’s two largest regions, the South and West, now have a majority of what were called “minority” students. Whites are only the second largest group in the West. The South, always the home of most black students, now has more Latinos than blacks and is a profoundly tri-racial region.

The Brown decision in 1954 challenged the legitimacy of the entire “separate but equal” educational system of the South, and initiated strides toward racial and social equality in schools across the nation. Desegregation progress was very substantial for Southern blacks, in particular, says the report, and occurred from the mid-1960s to the late l980s.

The authors state that, contrary to many claims, the South has not gone back to the level of segregation before Brown. It has, however, lost all of the additional progress made after l967, but is still the least segregated region for black students.

It wasn’t very long ago that I wrote about “microagressions“, aka “The stuff that piles up and wears you down”. After spending Mother’s Day dealing with a few wrong-headed micro-agressors who expended a lot of keyboard energy trying to derail discussion of the racial component in the coverage of the kidnappings in Nigeria, and media coverage of African countries-period-and then logging in yesterday to look at “youthful campus racism” against Native Americans, documented by Meteor Blades,  which isn’t coming from “old people” or from “the South”,  I thought it might be a good idea to dust off the Derailing for Dummies playbook for review.  

One of the most interesting positive events on the racial history front to garner some national press attention last week was the highlighting of the life and career of Harry S. McAlpin.  

Taking a time-out today from all the racist ugly, and tippin’ my top hat to the man who for me epitomizes the greatest American music.  

Today is the 115th anniversary of the birth, in Washington DC of Edward Kennedy Ellington-better known worldwide as the “Duke”.

Ellington’s Washington

Duke Ellington (1899-1974) grew up in Washington, D.C. during one of the most difficult periods for African-Americans. Social and political conditions for blacks were worsening in not only the South, but also the North. Many blacks were migrating from the South to the North hoping for a better life. In 1896, The United States Supreme Court declared racial segregation legal in public facilities in Plessy v. Ferguson. In Washington, D.C., segregation was greatly increasing. The Lincoln Memorial towered over the city as a symbol of equality, yet at its dedication in 1918, blacks had to sit in a segregated area. Despite all of these tensions, many blacks drew from the strength of the community, the vitality and the spirit of their rich culture. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was such a person whose strong pride worked effectively against the forces of racism. He fought this battle against racial problems and tensions with ease and grace.

Yesterday I was reading Kwik’s “Black Male Teen Unemployment Astronomical; Indicator Of How Society Stigmatizes, Rejects Them” which opened with:

My son is 19 and has been trying to get a job for three years…but nobody will hire him. I don’t want to believe it’s because he’s black, but…

When my son hit 16 in March of 2011, I told him: “Welcome to the work force!” I took him around to various fast food joints and grocery stores where he put in applications for basically any and every entry level job you can name from dishwasher to bus boy to bagger to stocker to janitor. We both thought it would be a matter of time before he got an interview and then a job. However, here it is over three years later and in spite of our continued efforts to find a job for him, he still hasn’t been hired.

My son is a great young man. He graduated from high school last year, made good grades and never got into trouble. Right now, he’s attending the local community college, where he continues to do well. To put it bluntly, he’s a model citizen.

One thing that really exasperates me is that one of his best friends of the Caucasion persuasion who I know well because he lives down the street from us and is roughly the same age, has already been hired at three different nearby places.  All of which are places where my son also applied, including the place with the golden arches, which generally hires almost anyone white that walks in without a prison record. That young man from down the street is not nearly as intelligent, responsible, well-mannered, well-groomed or well-spoken as my son. Not even close. Yet, he gets hired repeatedly?  And by the way, the reason he’s had at least three jobs is because he keeps getting fired.

We all are aware of the school-to-prison-pipeline, for profit-prisons, the targeting of young males of color in police programs like Stop and Frisk…and the death statistics for far too many of our youth cut down by gun violence and police. We also know that this nation has a long history of stereotyping black males into the roles of animals, and ‘wilding’ rapists, and thugs.  

Wherever there is a narrative, there are also efforts to build counter narratives. These young brothers have a video they would like you to see.

I make no secret about being a fan of Jay Smooth’s. I regularly use his video commentaries about race and other social justice issues in the classroom.  

“Jay Smooth” is the deejay moniker of John Randolph, who founded and hosts New York City’s longest running hip-hop radio program “Underground Railroad” on Pacifica Radio station WBAI-FM. He’s a blogger at hiphopmusic.com, and Ill Doctrine, and probably best known for his widely distributed video commentary “How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist”

I’m always looking for new tools to use to encourage thoughtful discussion about race, racism and racial relations, and browsing Jay Smooth alerted me to the report issued this year by Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation , entitled “Moving the Race Conversation Forward” which is something I recommend you read and pass on to others if you haven’t read it already.

Transcript below

Why am I not surprised?  

The National Urban League has released its 38th edition of the “State of Black America® – One Nation Underemployed: Jobs Rebuild America” report. (read full press release here) You can read the book online.

From AP:

The underemployment rate for African-American workers was 20.5 percent, the report said, compared to 18.4 percent for Hispanic workers and 11.8 percent for white workers. Underemployment is defined as those who are jobless or working part-time jobs but desiring full-time work.

I woke up this morning thinking of my father, who was born on April 1, 1919. I’ve written about him here in the past. He was responsible for ensuring that though the schools I attended during my growing up period did not teach black history, culture, arts, literature and drama (most still don’t) that I would get a well-rounded education at home. So, I became just as familiar with African and Caribbean writers and thinkers, as I was with the work of Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright.

In my teenage and young adult years there were ideological schisms within the various black movements in the U.S.-cultural nationalism, revolutionary nationalism, pacifistic militancy and integrationism, separatism, black power, Pan-Africanism, the Black Arts movement…all of which would affect how I viewed the world and experienced myself as a black person. Later I realized that much of this theoretical and ideological push and pull and influences, which was so critical to my development is still virtually unknown and unacknowledged by the majority, who have neatly packaged black history into a nice tidy Martin Luther King package, rarely including Africa and the diaspora, except to tie it to slavery. Unless one is a student in black or african studies, the struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism in politics and culture are also absent from the curricula.  

I remember talking to my dad about his interest in attending a cultural festival in Africa, and that the U.S. delegation was being headed by Langston Hughes, but I gave it little thought-I was away at school at the time, and my parents didn’t make the trip to Africa until several years later. I only recently realized that the festival he had spoken of was launched on his birthday.    

I want to rock the porch, and the pond,  with music today, on the last Tuesday of Women’s History Month 2014, and can’t find a better way to do it, than to celebrate with the sounds of our Sister Aretha Franklin, on her birthday.

I feel like every period of my life, from my high school years till now, has had her voice as part of the soundtrack.  

Aretha Louise Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 25, 1942. She was the  daughter of Barbara Siggers and Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, better known as Rev. C.L Franklin, who founded Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit Michigan, when he and his daughters relocated there in 1948.