Cloverfield

Go see this movie!
DO IT NOW!!!

Favorite Quote

From Black Issues Book Review, September/October 2007 issue.

Article: "Forty Years of Black-Owned Independent Publishing: Landmark birthday celebration for Third World Press"

Ishmael Reed, poet and author of New and Collected Poetry, 1994-2006 (Carrol & Graf Publishers, 2006). He debuts as a jazz pianist on For All We Know: The Ishmael Reed Quintet (available at CD Baby.com):

August 16, 2007, was a typical day for American newspapers. Blacks were associated with crime, almost exclusively, a pattern that I once thought began with the post-Reconstruction white media until it occurred to me that even before the Confederate Restoration, black were viewed as criminals. Stealing themselves!

Note: Remember that quote the next time somebody dismisses racism because "it was Blacks who sold their own people to the Europeans."

But if the criminal actions of black celebrities - Barry Bonds, Michael Vick, R. Kelly - weren't enough, there appeared more dismal news about black failure, which has provided job opportunities in the media for black "tough love" experts, who comment about black life from Cambridge and Greenwich Village an Georgetown: the gap between black and Latino school test scores, when compared with those of what the newspapers refer to as Asians and whites. Of course, thousands of whites and Asians are doing poorly, as well (see EdWeek.com's annual school reports), but when lumped together with other whites their failures are glossed over. It's like when Bill Gates walks into a bar. The mean income of the bar patrons rises significantly.

What those who support chauvinistic Eurocentric curriculum can't seem to answer is why some African and Afrocentric schools have succeeded where the public school system has failed. Even the Wall Street Journal acknowledges this achievement.* The students under the charge of Haki Madhubuti [founder of Third World Press] and his associates are among those who have succeeded. Mahubuti described his role with the schools as "running interference with the board of education and providing as much 'cultural substance' to our schools as possible."

Madhubuti's four schools - The Institute of Positive Education (1969), New Concept School (1972), Betty Shabazz International Charter School (1998), and the DuSable Leadership Academy (2005) - expose one thousand students to a curriculum that he describes as essentially "African Centric". By the age of two-and-a-half years old, he says, his students are exposed to African and African American culture in a way that is not "didactic."

"We teach both the students an the teachers to learn and how to love to learn." He credits his partner since 1974, Safisha Madhubuti, with the success of his enterprises. Safisha has a Ph.D from the University of Chicago and two of the principals of his schools hold Ph.Ds.

I asked his why his schools have been so successful in educating black children, especially the boys, while others have failed miserably. He said, "We are not afraid of our children. We love our children."

* Davidson, Joe. "Private Schools For Black Pupils Are Flourishing." Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1987

I Don't Care What Anyone Says...

Freakin' hillarious!





Happy New Year!