The View: Discussion on the "N" Word

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwFUY3s-w-s&feature=email


What say you?

I thought Elisabeth Hasselbeck was brave to speak her mind without being intimidated. While she did come across as defensive, young and could definitely work on her listening skills, overall I give her major brownie points for sticking it out.

LOL News Item of the Day: Nelson Mandela removed from the U.S. Terrorism Watchlists!

Celebrate! The great day has finally arrived!

Nelson Mandela will officially be removed from the U.S. terrorism watch lists. On Tuesday, President George Bush signed a bill - H.R. 5690 - enabling this to happen.

How on earth did Mandela get on these lists in the first place?



Well, during the time that the South African government enforced racial segregation (between 1948 and 1994), the government chose to classify the African National Congress (ANC) as a terrorist group because of the ANC's continual protest against the country's system of white-only rule. The U.S. followed suit and deemed Mr. Mandela and other members of the ANC as potential terrorists, denying them access to U.S. visas without special permission.

Years, and years later, a bill has been signed to reverse this decision. Now, the U.S. State and Homeland Security Departments are able to waive restrictions against ANC members. Specifically, the bill, "authorizes the Departments of State and Homeland Security to determine that provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act that render aliens inadmissible due to terrorist or criminal activities would not apply with respect to activities undertaken in association with the African National Congress in opposition to apartheid rule in South Africa."

I guess the legal process really does take time. I wonder what the great freedom fighter/27-year prison veteran/Nobel Peace Prize Winner/former President, Mr. Nelson Mandela, now 90-years old, thinks about all of this.


Source: CNN

LeBron James - Gisele Bundchen's Vogue Cover: Racist?

I looked at the cover and thought it was striking. Attention grabbing. Apparently some people looked at it and thought it was racist. Whaaat?! Someone please educate me.

Some say that the picture of LeBron is stereotypical, in that it shows James as the dangerous black man. LeBron, according to complaints, looks like King Kong and Gisele is the helpless Fay Wray. Also, the picture allegedly hits on another stereotype: the black man wanting the white woman.

Overly sensitive, are we?

I see a famous athlete - looking all powerful and like the champ he is. As a sign of his power and charisma, he just happens to be hanging out with one of the hottest models around. End of story.
Vogue, through spokesman Patrick O'Connell said that the magazine "sought to celebrate two superstars at the top of their game" in their once a year issue devoted to size and shape. He continued to say that "We think LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honored to have them on the cover."

Even if I stretch my imagination, I see no racism. The only complaint I could have is that Vogue is way, way behind the times, because it took them until 2008 to have their first black man on the magazine cover, when there have been so many viable candidates over the decades. If I think about that, maybe I will get upset.

Anita Hill & Clarence Thomas - 17 Years Later

Do you remember the Anita Hill & Clarence Thomas heated debate of the early 90's?

Professor Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991 and after much discussion, platforming and mudslinging, he was confirmed by the Senate with a 52-48 vote (the closest margin for more than a century) as the 106th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Since 1991, much has happened.

Anita Hill was credited with bringing into awareness the real issues of sexual harassment faced by women in the workplace. She is also said to have driven what is known as the "Year of the Woman" in 1992, when a record number of women were elected to the U.S. Senate. Seeing Professor Hill questioned on highly personal matters by a largely unsympathetic, 100% male audience, is said to have raised alarms about the dominance of men in the Senate. For more on the "Year of the Woman" read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_the_Woman.

Professor Hill faced many attacks since her 1991 testimony. For example, she was vilified by David Brock, in his novel The Real Anita Hill; however, Brock later confessed that the book was all lies and that he was acting as a "Conservative Hit Man" in a bid to protect Clarence Thomas and also threaten another witness, Kaye Savage, into backing down. Brock apologized to Professor Hill. In another incident, Anita Hill was asked to leave her professorship at the University of Oklahoma College of Law by some of her most vocal critics, or else - they threatened - the law school would be abolished.

Professor Hill currently teaches social policy, law, and women's studies at the prestigious Brandeis University at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. In 2002, approximately 10 years after the Clarence Thomas debate, Hill shared her reflections on the controversy. Please see http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2002/april3/anitahill-43.html for more details. For Anita's profile, please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Hill.

Clarence Thomas continues to serve as a Supreme Court Justice and has repeatedly denied charges of sexual harassment, even though Professor Hill was not the only woman in his past to speak out about his allegedly inappropriate behavior. Mr. Thomas considers himself to be a conservative with 'libertarian leanings'. For his general profile and more on his judicial philosophy, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas.

Saving Memories - Enid & Tintin

As a child, I was a big fan of Enid Blyton and Tintin comics (I also loved Asterix & Obelix, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Grimms Fairy tales, etc., but those stories are not the focus of this piece). We lived in Barbados for 4 years of my childhood (I was 4 when we first moved there), and every week (I think either Tuesdays or Wednesdays), when my mother went into town, she would bring us back some new books to read. We looked forward to her return and were always excited to see what new adventure we would explore with Enid or Tintin.

Ah, the memories.

Recently, there was a bit of reality that threatened my lovely memories. I started to think more about some of the characters in Enid's books, e.g. the Golliwog. I also thought about how many of the non-whites were portrayed in Tintin comics. I realized that there was a strong hint of racism, which as a child I was completely oblivious to.

Why? Why? Why? However, I refuse to taint my memories. I still enjoy a good Enid Blyton book and will probably buy Tintin comics for my future kids, continuing the tradition. I will just pretend this ugly side of racism doesn't exist - thinking of it as more of a reflection of that time in history vs. any malicious intent of the author - and continue to revel in the great writing and fascinating adventures portrayed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enid_blyton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwog

http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/society/index.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_and_Snowy

Don't Sugarcoat the Past...Learn From It

Long, Lonely Walk: Fifty years ago, as one of the Little Rock Nine, Elizabeth

Eckford marched into history

Little Rock, 50 Years Later

9/24/2007 - Newsweek, Ellis Cose

The image is among the most iconic in civil-rights history: a dignified black girl in a prim, white-and-black dress marches through a hostile mob intent on keeping her from school. Fifty years after it first flashed around the world, that image retains its power—evoking sorrow, even anger, that one so young would face such cruelty. Now a 65-year-old woman, Elizabeth Eckford still bears scars from that long, lonely walk as one of the Little Rock Nine: teenagers charged with integrating that city's finest high school in 1957. "I'm the only one who says I wouldn't do it again," said Eckford in an interview at the Little Rock courthouse where she works as a probation officer.

This month, Little Rock will commemorate the date, 50 years ago, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort black children to Central High. In that moment, Little Rock became a synonym for hate. After claiming that desegregation would lead to violence, Gov. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to keep black children from attending the school. Meanwhile, the black students designated to integrate Central High made plans to enter as a group. Eckford's family had no phone, so she never got the message. She came alone, only to be sent away by Faubus's soldiers and left to the angry mob.

No black child got in on the appointed day. Three weeks later, armed with a judge's order prohibiting Faubus from interfering, the students were spirited in through a side door (the mob was so unruly, however, police decided the Nine could not stay). In the weeks that followed, they endured unrelenting abuse. They never believed the task would be easy, but they had no idea how hellish it would become. Minnijean Brown Trickey was expelled for a fight she didn't start. "If we knew what it was going to be, we would have been too scared to go," says Trickey, who returned to Little Rock after many years away to care for an aged parent. Decades later, Eckford realized she suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. For years, she could not work. In her current job since 1999, she has found a measure of peace: it has taken "a long time getting there, a long time to talk about the past without crying."

Mostly, the Nine have flourished. Many got advanced degrees. All moved away—for a while, at least—and Little Rock tried to move on. Mayor Mark Stodola says it's time to put the past aside. He says Little Rock never deserved its racist reputation and that "the people who want to continue to look to the past are an impediment to where we want to go for the future." Ralph Brodie, a Central High football player and student-body president at the time of the crisis, says the reputations of many were unfairly tarnished by the actions of a few. Most people at Central were receptive to the black enrollees, he says, yet the world focused on "problem students—25 maybe, a minuscule percentage." The rest "did everything they could to make that schoolyear work," says Brodie, a lawyer and member of Central's 50th Anniversary Commission.

The black students do not remember things that way. "The tone was set by a couple of hundred students engaged in this reign of terror," says Ernest Green, one of the Nine and an executive with Lehman Brothers. "The silence was deafening. We would have appreciated some of them speaking out when all of this harassment was going on." Eckford also dismisses Brodie's point. Those who were silent, she says, are just unwilling to "think of themselves as bad people."

Today, like much of the rest of America, Little Rock grapples with a continuing achievement gap in its schools, economic distress in disproportionately minority neighborhoods and mistrust among competing communities and public officials. Earlier this year Central High student Brandon Love drew a straight line from the past to the present. In an article in the Arkansas Times and elsewhere, he observed that his Advanced Placement classes were overwhelmingly white: "As an African American and the student body president, I have encountered A Tale of Two Centrals ... As the only African American in most of my classes, I experience firsthand what some dismiss as 'subtle' racism," he wrote. Nancy Rousseau, the transplanted New Yorker who is principal at Central, acknowledges that more whites than blacks take AP classes—but she blames differences in preparation and achievement, not discrimination. "That's an issue that we're dealing with, an issue that, unfortunately, is universal," she says. "There are places that are overcoming it, and I want us to be one of them."

The Supreme Court agrees that focusing on past racial wrongs will not yield solutions for the future—as made clear in June by its ruling against voluntary school-desegregation plans. But there is still a point in remembering how we got here, and remembering how determined some people were to keep Americans apart—if only because it reminds us of why it remains so hard for us to come together.