Obama's "Race to the Top" is racist;
Ras Baraka for Mayor of Newark;
Anniversary of Trayvon Martin's death;
Students Against Mass Incarceration announce Conference on Criminal Justice at Howard U;
Is the EEOC dismissing racial discrimination cases en masse?;
The carving up of Africa has begun.
Race to the Top” is Racist
Hundreds of Black and brown parents, students and activists descended on Washington to protest thousands of school closings under President Obama’s Race to the Top program. “For the first time you have parents uniting, communities uniting, students uniting in challenging these policies and calling them racist,” said journalist Jaisal Noor. The protestors denounced preferential treatment of charter schools, and called for a national moratorium on school closings.
Ras Baraka for Mayor of Newark
“We need to fight for living wage jobs,” said Ras Baraka, a high school principal, son of poet and activist Amiri Baraka, and candidate for mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Current mayor Cory Booker, a darling of the media and corporations, has his sights set on a U.S. Senate seat. Booker “either didn’t care about our problems from the beginning,” said Baraka, “or he faced our problems and realized it was too heavy form him to deal with and carry out his own, personal agenda at the same time.”
Trayvon Martin Death Anniversary
People should “take to the streets in outrage, and wear hoodies” on February 26 to mark the anniversary of teenager Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of a Florida vigilante, said Carl Dix, co-founder of Stop Stop-and-Frisk. The case “has been dragging on. They’re trying to play us,” said Dix. “They’re trying to see how long it takes for our outrage to go away.”
Conference on Criminal Justice
Students Against Mass Incarceration will hold a national conference at Howard University, April 19 and 20, said co-founder Benjamin Woods. The group has expanded to six chapters. “We want to bring back the Black student movement,” said Woods, a PhD candidate at Howard. “Mass incarceration is the human rights issue of our generation.”
EEOC Dismisses Black Cases En Masse
A recent report from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claims the agency has reduced its backlog of to 70,000 cases. However, Ricardo Jones, the former chief investigator for the New York district of the EEOC, says the agency is doing a worse job than under President George Bush. Any reduction in backlog is due to wrongful dismissal of racial discrimination complaints, said Jones. “The statistics clearly show that.”
The Carving-Up of Africa Has Begun
Dr. Francis Boyle, renowned professor of international law (University of Illinois, Champaign), says the 2011 “Libya attack was designed to allow the U.S. and NATO to project power southward into Africa,” and led directly to western military intervention in Mali. “What we are seeing is a new ‘Berlin Conference’ carve-up of Africa, to loot and plunder its natural resources,” said Boyle, whose new book is titled Destroying Libya and World Order.
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: One hour.
This week readers discussed the Democratic Party’s theater and the new arms race in outer space.
An educator helps students navigate books that reveal Blackness as historicity, slavery as both obscured and ever-present, and the violence of race.
It takes many voices from a world of disciplines to tell the story of Paul Robeson, the supreme talent ad intellect that the US State attempted to erase from history.
Stories that embarrass high officials can earn reporters treason charges, imprisonment and death.
The jury felt they weren’t hearing the whole story, due to the suppression of nearly every relevant fact in the case.
