Last week, a Blue Island, Illinois 15-year-old was punished for refusing to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance.
Shemar Cooper refused to stand for the pledge, because as he says “America does not expect blacks”. The first time he didn’t stand up she came up to him and told him to participate, however he didn’t give up. The next day he refused to stand up again, but this time he was forced to. His teacher made him do this and continued to harass him during the whole week.
After his mother found out about the incident she was outraged and she wants charges filed against the teacher.
This teacher needs to be punished for his actions. It’s against the law to violate kid’s First Amendment rights, so why do we even need rights, when we can’t exercise them?
Basquiat’s Former Home and Studio Gets a Permanent Plaque
Next time you’re in Greenwich Village, visit artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s former home and studio at 57 Great Jones Street. Thanks to the Greenwich Village Society For Historic Preservation, there’s a lovely plaque marking the site.
[Photo: Greenwich Village Society for History Preservation]
(via Basquiat’s Former Home and Studio Gets a Permanent Plaque)
Teacher humiliates black 1st-grader by throwing away her shoes
Little black girl was humiliated by her teacher for fiddling with her shoes.
Tha way her mother found out about this is heartbreaking.Taraji started crying refusing to wear new shoes her mother bought her for shool becuse her teacher threw them in a trash.
The sandal strap was bothering Taraji during her math class at school, so she kept touching the strap and the teacher just couldn’t handle it. She threw Taraji’s shoes in the trash and made her walk around barefoot for part of the day. She was embarassed and humilited in front of her classmates. This is an unacceptable behaviour.
Here’s my father’s band from the mid-70s playing in their Brownsville, Brooklyn livingroom. Papi is in the back right on drums, my uncle on guitar, and a cousin on bass. That’s guelo’s bald head shining in the bottom right corner. How tio tryna play guitar and maracas at the same time, though?
Human migration from Africa to Europe more than 30,000 years ago appears to have left its mark on the genes of Europeans today.
The DNA of European-Americans appears to carry proportionately more harmful genetic changes than that of African-Americans, because they emerged from a smaller and less diverse population.
The study of 35 people, published in Nature by a team led by Prof Carlos Bustamante of Cornell University, New York State, shows that the proportion of single letter spelling variations in the human genetic code that are probably harmful and unique to that particular population are significantly higher in the European-Americans (16 per cent) than in the African-American sample (12 percent) his team analysed.
“What is happening at an individual level will vary tremendously within and among populations,” stressses Prof Bustamante, explaining that the effect can only be seen in the population level and it is not known how these deleterious mutations affects disease risk.
His team speculates that this is a consequence of a “bottleneck” - a huge decline in numbers - that Europeans experienced at about the time of the migration out of Africa, around 45,000 years ago.
“What we may be seeing is a ‘population genetic echo’ of the founding of Europe,” says Prof Bustamante, and senior co-author with Prof Andrew Clark.
Because the founder population of Europeans was much smaller, they today have a higher proportion of harmful genetic mutations, which would have been diluted without the bottleneck, an effect that was only thought to affect small populations before this study.
Like astronomers who build ever-larger telescopes to peer deeper into space, population geneticists are probing the human genetic code in unprecedented detail, confirming our origns in Africa, where today the most genetically diverse range of people reside.
The work underlines why the scientific establishment recoiled at the claim by DNA pioneer James Watson that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really”.
The furore led the Nobel laureate to abandon a recent book tour of Britain and the studies published in the journal Nature show why it was meaningless to talk about “Africa” in a discussion of the genetics of intelligence, since the continent has the biggest variation of DNA on the planet, reflecting how it was the cradle of humankind and that the DNA of its inhabitants has evolved and changed there the longest.
In a second study in Nature, this time of 485 people, University of Michigan’s Prof Noah Rosenberg and colleagues, led by Andrew Singleton at the National Institute on Aging, Bethesda, outline how human genetic diversity decreases as distance from Africa increases.
People of African descent are more genetically diverse than Middle Easterners, who are more diverse than Asians and Europeans. Native Americans possess the least-diverse genomes. As a result, searching for disease-causing genes should require the fewest number of genetic markers among Native Americans and the greatest number of markers among Africans.
The patterns revealed by the new study support the idea that humans originated in Africa, then spread into the Middle East, followed by Europe and Asia, the Pacific Islands, and finally to the Americas.
They report more examples of a recently discovered type of human genetic variation, known as a copy-number variant or CNV.
They found 507 previously unknown CNVs, which are large chunks of DNA - up to 1,000,000 consecutive “letters” of the genetic alphabet - that are either repeated or deleted entirely from a person’s genome. Various diseases can be triggered by an abnormal gain or loss in the number of gene copies.
While previous studies have found that broad-scale geographic ancestry could be successfully traced, the new results indicate “it’s becoming increasingly possible to use genomics to refine the geographic position of an individual’s ancestors with more and more precision,” Prof Rosenberg adds.
“It is a drama of love and social too. (It’s) an old project of Luiz Fernando Carvalho that he invited me to participate in. We write everything in prose, a novel, and then we write the script. The series is a victory in an unequal and racist country like Brazil. We will show that through culture, family, religion and especially love, it’s possible to overcome barriers.”
-Paulo Lins, on the new Brazilian
TV series; ‘Subúrbia’
A new study in the American Journal of Epidemiology definitely adds a point to the #TeamNatural tally with a published paper from researchers at Boston University linking hair relaxers to uterine fibroid tumors in women and early puberty in young girls.
Led by Lauren Wise of Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center, scientists followed more than 23,000 pre-menopausal Black American women from 1997 to 2009 and found that the two- to three-times higher rate of fibroids among black women may be linked to chemical exposure through scalp lesions and burns resulting from relaxers.
Women who got their first menstrual period before the age of 10 were also more likely to have uterine fibroids, and early menstruation may result from hair products black girls are using, according to a separate study published in the Annals of Epidemiology last summer. Three hundred African American, African Caribbean, Hispanic, and White women in New York City were studied. The women’s first menstrual period (menarche) varied anywhere from age 8 to age 19, but African Americans, who were more likely to use straightening and relaxers hair oils, also reached menarche earlier than other racial/ethnic groups.
While so far, there is only an association rather than a cause and effect relationship between relaxers, menarche, and fibroid tumors, as Tamika Fletcher, co-owner of Natural Resources salon in Houston, pointed out in a Fox report, the hair care industry isn’t regulated by the FDA so there’s no telling what black women are putting in their hair and how harmful those products may be.
These studies go way beyond the damaging effects chemical relaxers may have on one’s hair, women and girls may be damaging their reproductive systems with some of the hair products they use, making it even more critical to know exactly what you’re putting in your hair and in your body.
How do you research the hair products you use and make sure their safe?
“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.”
‒Rita Mae Brown
I just recently watched a documentary called “The End of Poverty” and I couldn’t help but realize something: all the African commentators that they had speak in the film spoke only English… So what right?
Well it got me thinking. Many of the other speakers in the film spoke foreign languages that were translated on screen. ALL of the African ones spoke english.
Africa is the richest continent on this planet. That is a fact. Culturally resourcefully, and also LINGUISTICALLY! There are well over 2000 languages spoken in Africa. So why then do we choose only to speak the language of our oppressor? In all of Africa, there are only about 13 countries that have ethnic languages as national or official languages. Of this small amount of countries, NONE of them have an ethnic official language stand alone without being sided by a foreign language.
During times of colonization, people in Africa were forced to begin speaking the language of their colonizer. English and French are the most spoken European languages throughout Africa. Growing up, I’ve heard someone be called “illiterate” many time because they spoke poor English. Firstly, that doesn’t even make sense as the word illiterate is never used correctly in that context, actually making you an illiterate according to your own definition. Secondly, a person is no less because they do not speak a European language well! Many people are masters of their own languages and can write it very well too, even spit proverbs at you and everything!
In many African countries there are now reforms being put in place to increase the amount of foreign languages spoken and decrease ethnic languages. In some countries, students are now penalized for speaking ethnic languages on school grounds (WTF right?).
Overseas, many African parents do not teach their ethnic language to their children in thought that they are actually protecting them and doing them a favour. More and more African parents are beginning to realize the mistake that they have made, it is many times too late. Children have the power of learning up to 6 languages at young ages, there is no reason why we should not pass on the gift of language to our children.
By depriving a child their language of ethnic origin, you decrease the likelihood of that child’s interest in their culture. This has been done to slaves in efforts to condition them. We are not slaves anymore, why are we conditioning ourselves? In today’s world, speaking more than one language makes you more marketable. We have African kids in schools learning to fluently speak Spanish and French, but they wouldn’t even be able to understand a death threat in their own language! Let’s work on preserving our languages, it’s important!
Post written by @Ola_Show
~Signed the African girl who is tired of feeling like part of a vanishing breed because she speaks her language.~
In the Blombos Cave in South Africa around 10 years ago, the oldest art ever discovered was excavated from where it’s been hiding from us for nearly 80,000 years. The art is just two tiny pieces of ochre with carved patterns of crossed lines. These two artworks are estimated to be around 77,000 years ago, so they were created during the Middle Stone Ages.
This means as far back as 4,000 generations ago, people in Africa were creating art. When we look at pieces contemporary pieces of African art, like the Burkina Faso - Pastel Colored Mask, it is always important to remember that this art was produced from the accumulation of thousands upon thousands of years of African art traditions. We emphasize this point due to the fact European scholars, who upon discovering African art, labeled it “primitive”, which is terribly ironic given African art traces its roots all the way back to the origins of humanity.
From this finding scholar speculate that not only were Africans making art, but they also were using grammatical speech. Scholars link this art to speech because the abstract symbols on the art have to represent something- although today we can’t even begin decipher the meaning of the symbols. When you look at the steadiness and purposefulness of the pattern of the lines on the pieces of red ochre, it is easy to tell this design had to be intentionally carved into the ochre. Also, in order to share such art, the people who created these two pieces of ochre would need the verbal skills to explain what exactly the art meant to other individuals. Read More
China denounces [United States’] treatment of Afro-descendants
“In conclusion, The People’s Republic of China demands that America stop using their cry of human rights violations against other sovereign nations in order to declare war on them to steal their resources when America flagrantly violates the human rights of Afro-descendants and other minorities within its own country.”
this article just drops stat. after stat. on the racial inequalities in the U.S. good read.
“[P]olice act as state-sanctioned gangs charged with the task of upholding the violent, racist hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism and, whenever possible, furthering a monopoly of power where all violence from/by those higher on the hierarchy upon those lower can be normalized into business as usual. Any deviation from this business as usual, any resistance – the threat of force… or any displacement of state power whatsoever – by those lower on the hierarchy upon those higher is met with brutal repression. This is why cops are always present at protests. It is NOT to “Keep the peace.” We have seen their “peace” – tear gas, rubber and wooden bullets, mace, riot gear, sound cannons, and thousands of brutal cops leaving dead bodies. They are not there for peace, but rather to maintain at all times the explicit reminder of America’s power hierarchy through the brutalization of black and brown bodies above all others.”
– Gangs of the State: Police and the Hierarchy of Violence | Truthout
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