Source: curlynikki.com

If you don’t love Melissa Harris-Perry already, you just might now. During a segment on her Saturday morning news show on MSNBC, the Tulane University professor gave the best on-air shut down since Tamron Hall had to put a guest in his place back in May.

Things got heated during a discussion of welfare benefits when business and finance expert Mehta Rose said the big thing that was missing from President Obama’s “You didn’t build that speech” was an emphasis on taking risks. This is the point at which Melissa Harris-Perry exploded:

“What is riskier than living poor in America? Seriously! What in the world is riskier than being a poor person in America?

“I live in a neighborhood where people are shot on my street corner. I live in a neighborhood where people have to figure out how to get their kid into school because maybe it will be a good school and maybe it won’t.

“I am sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky. No. There is a huge safety net that whenever you fail will catch you and catch you and catch you. Being poor is what is risky. We have to create a safety net for poor people. And when we won’t, because they happen to look different from us, it is the pervasive ugliness.”

Please check the screen still at the 0:30-0:32 second mark. Mehta Rose’s face was priceless.

Unfortunately, it’s clear Rose missed the point when she continued to talk about what separates entrepreneurs from other smart people, which she said is using the ropes we all (theoretically) have access to. Then, in a debate with other panelists on who really creates jobs, entrepreneurs or consumers, Rose snarkily said “some of us go to Dairy Queen and others start businesses.”

Later in the show Professor Harris-Perry apologized for losing her temper, saying that it had been a particularly difficult week for her with losing her home in New Orleans due to Hurricane Isaac. I personally didn’t see temper as much as I saw passion. Harris-Perry’s reaction reminds me of words President Obama said in one of his speeches during the 2008 election season when he criticized the whole bootstraps philosophy, saying something to the effect of how can one pull himself up by the bootstraps if they don’t even have boots.

What do you think about this debate and Melissa Harris-Perry’s response?

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Source: faceforwardfashion.blogspot.com

By Faye McCray

The day I woke up with nappy hair, my husband punched me in the face, jumped out of our second story bedroom window and immediately started f**king the white woman next door. I would not have known what happened but for the swinging blinds beating against the windowpane and his warm imprint lingering in my bed. I stopped for a moment to feel sorrowful, the breeze from our open window forming goosebumps on my skin, but then realized I was probably a lesbian so it was all good.

I yelled “Goodbye!” to my husband from the window he left open and took my time emerging from my bedroom. I did not feel like showering and could only put together clothes that did not match and earrings that were loud and cheap. Confused and stupider, I emerged from my bedroom only to find my house in disarray. My children had gotten into my collection of lint and decided to throw it all over our living room. Unable to find the broom or vacuum, I bent down and swept it up with my hair. When it came time to wash it, as hard as I tried I could not remember how or if I ever had. I felt lazy, craved chicken and suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to smoke weed laced with crack with Trick Daddy. Adorned in lint, I could feel my naps grow tighter, my skin grow darker and my lips grow fuller and fuller. A thin shield of ash formed across my skin and the more I licked it, the ashier I became.

I left for work late because I forgot to pay attention to the time and on the way out, I asked the garbage man to watch my kids and to give me five dollars for the bus ride there. Mistaking me for the raccoon that had been terrorizing our neighborhood, he pulled out a stick and hit me over the head. By the time I came to, he had already fled, leaving the garbage piled up in our front yard. Enjoying the smell, I sat amongst the garbage for a moment licking my ash and thinking about how much I loved salt and welfare. During my walk to work, I felt itchy and angry. I battled with deciding whether to steal something or protest. I decided instead to dance, scratch, and yell incoherent things to the people walking in and out of the local Starbucks. A police officer tried to arrest me. Despite my waning intellect, my superior athletic skills proved no match as I outran him through the streets of my town.

Remembering I had to go to work, I stopped off at McDonalds to dance and scratch with the patrons outside the store. Loving it, I enjoyed a super-sized value meal and took a nap on top of the ball pit under the slide in the children’s play area. The manager woke me up to join me in a short dance and scratch but then asked me to leave because I was distracting his employees. When I finally got to work, I had trouble getting in. Although the door was unlocked, I felt more comfortable sneaking in a window and I had trouble finding a window that I could break, instead of just opening. When I finally made it in, feeling hungry, sneaky and violent, I snuck into the break room and stole everyone’s food and drink. I wrote menacing notes in place of the food in breath fog and spilled flavored drink all over the floor without cleaning up. I took another nap before heading to my office. I dreamt about drug crimes, Hip Hop videos and yelling the word, “B**ch!”

When I finally found my way to office, my boss was waiting and fired me instantly. Among other things, he declared that my hair made me blacker and accused me of lying on my application about my Native American lineage. On the way out, none of my co-workers made eye contact. One, a cross-dressing black man named, Tyler Martin, did a short dance and scratch in solidarity, which, despite my unemployment, made me laugh all the way down the elevator and out of the building. I loved to laugh. When I exited, the police officer I thought I had outrun was waiting for me with handcuffs. I was indicted, convicted of Being Nappy and sentenced to life wandering the continent of Africa.

The Judge offered to suspend my sentence if I agreed to serve three hours in a local beauty salon and be treated with Affirm Hair Relaxer and two packs of Indian Remy 1B hair. I chose the latter.

I’d like to thank Wendy Williams for her thoughtful commentary on Viola Davis’s choice to go natural for the Oscars for inspiring me to turn my life around. I would also like to thank hair relaxer, the people of India and celebrity hairstylist, André Walker.

Author’s Note: This post was fiction and meant to be satirical. Any feelings that were hurt in the drafting of the post were purely accidental. The author of this post is a mother of two who recently decided to go natural. Surprisingly, her husband has not left her, she kept her job, she continues to fight the urge to scratch and dance and she has not entered a life of crime. In fact, she thinks she looks kind of cute.
Faye McCray is a native of New York City and current resident of the Baltimore Metro Area. She is a published blogger currently working on her first novel. She is also an attorney and married mother of two.

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Source: blakparent.com

With the economy not quite at its strongest, finding work still remains a difficult task for some.

Nationally, the unemployment rate is still above 8.3 percent, with unemployment rate among blacks at 14.4 percent. In Philadelphia, there are four people per every job available. The unemployment rate is around 9 percent, with blacks and Hispanics making up a large chunk of that figure. Philly’s public sector has shed approximately 9,000 jobs over the past year, which used to be the bread and butter of most blacks. Of course the official unemployment numbers do not include the unemployable (i.e. those with criminal records) and those folks who have been out of work for more than a year, thus no longer qualify for unemployment benefits. When you factor in those numbers, the real figure is somewhere in the double digits.

Yet it seems that the fastest growing industry in the city are daycare facilities. Walk down any Philadelphia street within black and Hispanic neighborhoods and you will see a plethora of child care choices. They are in old renovated warehouses, storefronts and operating out of residential homes. Sometimes there are daycare facilities opened on the same block – in some cases across the street from each other.  These facilities run from 8 hours, five days a week to up to 23 hours/7 days a week serving all sorts of children from infants all the way up to first graders.

Most ironically, most of these daycare facilities are housed in communities with high unemployment and unemployable rates. Which makes me ask: if the people ain’t working then why are there so many daycare facilities in low-income communities?

What got me thinking on this dichotomy was a film I had watched a couple of weeks ago called the Pruitt-Igoe Myth, which was about the failure of one of the first housing projects in the country. As explained in the documentary, the projects came about as a way to deal with the slums, which were occupied by poor working class folks, who mainly worked in downtown St. Louis, thus needed residency close to their employment. Believing that the slums deterred growth within the St. Louis, the city came up with a plan to tear down the slums and move the working poor to public housing.  At first the projects were declared a victory in the war on poverty. However neither the city, nor the state, ever properly funded the project, thus basic maintenance within the facilities was ignored and eventually the high rises began to fall in disarray.

There is more to this story including how the Housing Development Act, which was used to fund the creation of the projects, also contributed to white flight out of the city, thus creating a further void in tax dollars, to support this project.  However, the most interesting part of the film is an interview, with one former tenant of Priutt-Igoe, who recalled an incident, where the city’s welfare came to her slum and told her mother that they would give the family free housing plus food allotment but the only stipulation was that the kids’ fathers, couldn’t come.  According to the film, this practice was commonplace for many families in the projects.  And as many black intellectuals have long suspected, it was this practice of removing the father from the household for financial security, which has contributed to the destruction of black families, particularly those in the lower rungs of society.

From EurWeb.com

indianapublicmedia.org

For the folks that are abusing the system … STOP IT!

There are so many people starving and homeless in America that really need the help from social programs funded by the federal and state governments and even more Republicans ready to cut all programs for the actions of a few.

All they need is excuses like folks using the money on their EBT cards to buy drugs and cigarettes. But, one dude takes it even further than that.

For the complete story, visit EurWeb.com.

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Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson isn’t a friend of many and he’s probably racked up quite a few more enemies with his latest comments in which he says he agrees with Newt Gingrich’s statements about black people demanding paychecks instead of food stamps. But Peterson took think a few steps further, as he usually does, saying what black people need to get back on the employment track is hard work—in the form of slavery.

“One of the things that I would do is take all black people back to the South and put them on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working,” Peterson told The Huffington Post’s Black Voices. “I’m going to put them all on the plantation. They need a good hard education on what it is to work.”

Education, maybe. Plantation, no.

“People don’t want to hear the truth,” Peterson added. “Newt was 100 percent correct. Newt said that he would have black children, minority children work as janitors at school. Working as a janitor would build character, more so than the handouts so many of them like.

“I know some people take it personally because a whole lot of folks don’t like hearing the truth; they like to be in denial,” he said. “Not all black people, but most black people know, and white people know, and black people say it more in private than they would in public, but for the last 50 years or so, generations and generations of black people have relied on the government or someone else to take care of them.”

He goes on to paint all black women with the same generational welfare queen brush, while expressing hope that black people will turn away from the Democratic party and it’s “godless leaders.” It’s too bad he doesn’t understand that he’s feeding into all of the sterotypes every time he opens his mouth, and that he’s doing black people no favors when he puts forth such ridiculous suggestions. There are more ways to build character than by working as a slave or janitor, maybe the rev should give it a try so he can build some himself.

What do you think about Rev. Peterson’s comments? Is he doing the black community harm or good by speaking out like this?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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A seven-hour standoff at a Texas Department of Health and Human Services building that was staged by a mother who was denied food stamps ended with the woman killing her two children and then herself.

The victims were mother Rachelle Grimmer, 38, her 12-year-old daughter Ramie, and her 10-year-old son Timothy. Grimmer first applied for food stamps in July after moving to Laredo, TX, from Zanesville, OH; she was denied assistance because she didn’t turn in enough information. When the department didn’t hear back from Grimmer, her case was closed Aug. 8 due to lack of a full application.

Stephanie Goodman, a spokesperson for the Department of Health, told The Associated Press Grimmer’s last contact with the agency appeared to be a phone call in mid-November. When she entered the Laredo office on Monday around 5 pm, Grimmer asked to speak to a new caseworker and was taken to a private room to discuss her case. The mother then revealed a gun and the standoff began.

Police negotiators stayed on the phone with Grimmer throughout the evening, but she kept hanging up, Laredo police investigator Joe Baeza said. Grimmer allegedly told negotiators about a slew of complaints against state and federal government agencies, but Baeza said he still wasn’t entirely sure what sparked the standoff.

“This wasn’t like a knee-jerk reaction,” he said, adding that Grimmer felt she was owed restitution.

Grimmer released a supervisor around 7:45pm, but stayed inside the office with her children. After hanging up the phone around 11:45pm, police say they heard three shots. When the SWAT team entered the building, they found Grimmer unconscious. Her children were “very critical.”

Goodman said she didn’t know whether Grimmer had a job or whether her children were covered under Medicaid or the state children’s health insurance program. She added that it’s possible the family’s move from Ohio may have complicated Grimmer’s application if the family had no Texas records the agency could check electronically. Grimmer would have also been denied benefits if she was receiving welfare assistance.

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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I really don’t understand what’s going on with teachers across America these days. Perhaps it’s the increased access to more news that makes cases of discrimination in the classroom seem more frequent than ever before. Parents of students at Winnetonka High School in Kansas City, MO, are up in arms after Marcus Williams, Jr., a senior there, filed a racial harassment complaint with the school district after his basketball coach, Derek Howard, made offensive remarks to him.

Williams told KCTV5.com that when photography students asked him to pose for a picture, the coach stopped and said the words “future welfare recipient” should be printed beneath the photo.

“I just felt belittled, crushed, and utterly discouraged,” Williams said, adding that this is not coach Howard’s first offense. He said in his past two years of interacting with the coach, he regularly made demoralizing comments either directly to African-American students or about them. Consequently, Williams chose not to try out for basketball this year.

Williams’ father, Marcus Williams, Sr. said he wants Howard removed from his coaching and teaching position with the school. So far, Howard has only been placed on paid leave while under investigation.

Dr. Dan Clemens, the district assistant superintendent released a statement saying:

The behaviors reported by this student do not reflect our professional conduct standards and will not be tolerated. We expect all students to be treated with respect by all staff at all times.

I certainly hope that is the case. It’s not shocking to me that these teachers and coaches have the racist mindsets that they do, but I am surprised that they will so blatantly express their bigotry out in the open. What could be motivating them?

Do you think offensive school staff members expect to be protected by the school and get away with making comments like this? More importantly, what are these comments doing to black students’ self esteem?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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More black women in this country are baby-mamas than they are wives. Some even have multiple children with multiple men. Indeed there are several who qualify as hoodrats—of which such outcomes are expected. However, many are quite the opposite—educated, successful, selective. Certainly no one would classify Nia Long as a rat; yet, she has birthed two children out-of-wedlock.

73 percent of black children enter this world at a disadvantage—they are more likely to live in poverty, and more vulnerable to a life in the animal house called prison. Why? We have grown callous to subliminal media influences and fallen victim to false truths and our own naiveté. You see it’s not necessarily the type of man you date that makes you susceptible; it is the defects in your approach to life and romantic relationships.

Here is a list of some of the wrong-thinking that can place you in the position to do it all, alone:

Read the rest of this entry »

(Huffington Post) — It probably comes as no surprise that money troubles often lead to marital strife. But could receiving government assistance such as food stamps, Medicaid or welfare do further harm to your marriage?  The answer is yes–and in a big way, according to Dr. David Schramm, a researcher and professor at the University of Missouri.  In a study released earlier this month, Dr. Schramm found that, among couples in the same income bracket, those receiving government assistance experience lower rates of positive bonding, commitment to their spouses and overall satisfaction in their marriages. They are also more prone to divorce, negative interaction and feeling trapped in their marriages.

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(Time) — Under a new Florida law, people applying for welfare have to take a drug test at their own expense. If they pass, they are eligible for benefits and the state reimburses them for the test. If they fail, they are denied welfare for a year, until they take another test. Mandatory drug testing for welfare applicants is becoming a popular idea across the U.S. Many states — including Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Louisiana — are considering adopting laws like Florida’s. At the federal level, Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has introduced the Drug Free Families Act of 2011, which would require all 50 states to drug-test welfare applicants.  And the focus isn’t even limited to welfare. In July, Indiana adopted drug tests for participants in a state job-training program. An Ohio state senator, Tim Grendell, recently said he plans to introduce a bill to require the unemployed to take a drug test before they receive unemployment benefits.

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