I wish younger heads would show a bit more respect to Bill Cosby, this guy has done more for blacks than any student activist writing for the village voice and the like. Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, the 2 landmark comedians in black or any race for that matter.

Now, with Stanley and Mchorter, these guys get on my nerves and have done nothing but bitch about shit and make a career out of that, I know Stanley is a Jazz geek and always going on about "jazz is the last great american art form", but this guy and that mchorter need to get a real job. I can tolerate Spike at least he is a great director and has opened a lot of doors to me, Spike and Bill gave earned the right to say what they want whether I agree with them or not.

And lets be honest, hip hop is to blame. I dont care what no lefty liberal says, these idiot mainstream rappers with their thug shit pioneered by slavemasters like Jimmy Iovine need to stop and think about their negative influence on young people, but wait i get it, they are making money by just playing up to that stereotype, oh I see, they are so clever. peace. racism still exists out there but these rappers making it easy for them.

these stats are disheartening but nothing new. what's equally disturbing is how the article already posits blame on a system that 'privileges' poor women and (gasp) makes men pay child support. scapegoated again.

lol @ Jay Smooth being a choice

Greg Tate?

Aaron McGruder and Uncle "thank-God-for-white-people" Ruckus

...oh yeah...and everyone over 40 years old in Academia

Somebody cut and paste the article.
NY times asks for membership.

Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
By ERIK ECKHOLM

BALTIMORE — Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.

Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.

Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.

Although the problems afflicting poor black men have been known for decades, the new data paint a more extensive and sobering picture of the challenges they face.

"There's something very different happening with young black men, and it's something we can no longer ignore," said Ronald B. Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia University and editor of "Black Males Left Behind" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

"Over the last two decades, the economy did great," Mr. Mincy said, "and low-skilled women, helped by public policy, latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back."

Many of the new studies go beyond the traditional approaches to looking at the plight of black men, especially when it comes to determining the scope of joblessness. For example, official unemployment rates can be misleading because they do not include those not seeking work or incarcerated.

"If you look at the numbers, the 1990's was a bad decade for young black men, even though it had the best labor market in 30 years," said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and co-author, with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner, of "Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills — like parenting, conflict resolution and character building — as they are on teaching job skills.

These were among the recent findings:

¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

None of the litany of problems that young black men face was news to a group of men from the airless neighborhoods of Baltimore who recently described their experiences.

One of them, Curtis E. Brannon, told a story so commonplace it hardly bears notice here. He quit school in 10th grade to sell drugs, fathered four children with three mothers, and spent several stretches in jail for drug possession, parole violations and other crimes.

"I was with the street life, but now I feel like I've got to get myself together," Mr. Brannon said recently in the row-house flat he shares with his girlfriend and four children. "You get tired of incarceration."

Mr. Brannon, 28, said he planned to look for work, perhaps as a mover, and he noted optimistically that he had not been locked up in six months.

A group of men, including Mr. Brannon, gathered at the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, one of several private agencies trying to help men build character along with workplace skills.

The clients readily admit to their own bad choices but say they also fight a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

"It hurts to get that boot in the face all the time," said Steve Diggs, 34. "I've had a lot of charges but only a few convictions," he said of his criminal record.

Mr. Diggs is now trying to strike out on his own, developing a party space for rentals, but he needs help with business skills.

"I don't understand," said William Baker, 47. "If a man wants to change, why won't society give him a chance to prove he's a changed person?" Mr. Baker has a lot of record to overcome, he admits, not least his recent 15-year stay in the state penitentiary for armed robbery.

Mr. Baker led a visitor down the Pennsylvania Avenue strip he wants to escape — past idlers, addicts and hustlers, storefront churches and fortresslike liquor stores — and described a life that seemed inevitable.

He sold marijuana for his parents, he said, left school in the sixth grade and later dealt heroin and cocaine. He was for decades addicted to heroin, he said, easily keeping the habit during three terms in prison. But during his last long stay, he also studied hard to get a G.E.D. and an associate's degree.

Now out for 18 months, Mr. Baker is living in a home for recovering drug addicts. He is working a $10-an-hour warehouse job while he ponders how to make a living from his real passion, drawing and graphic arts.

"I don't want to be a criminal at 50," Mr. Baker said.

According to census data, there are about five million black men ages 20 to 39 in the United States.

Terrible schools, absent parents, racism, the decline in blue collar jobs and a subculture that glorifies swagger over work have all been cited as causes of the deepening ruin of black youths. Scholars — and the young men themselves — agree that all of these issues must be addressed.

Joseph T. Jones, director of the fatherhood and work skills center here, puts the breakdown of families at the core.

"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good role models," said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream society."

All the negative trends are associated with poor schooling, studies have shown, and progress has been slight in recent years. Federal data tend to understate dropout rates among the poor, in part because imprisoned youths are not counted.

Closer studies reveal that in inner cities across the country, more than half of all black men still do not finish high school, said Gary Orfield, an education expert at Harvard and editor of "Dropouts in America" (Harvard Education Press, 2004).

"We're pumping out boys with no honest alternative," Mr. Orfield said in an interview, "and of course their neighborhoods offer many other alternatives."

Dropout rates for Hispanic youths are as bad or worse but are not associated with nearly as much unemployment or crime, the data show.

With the shift from factory jobs, unskilled workers of all races have lost ground, but none more so than blacks. By 2004, 50 percent of black men in their 20's who lacked a college education were jobless, as were 72 percent of high school dropouts, according to data compiled by Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton and author of the forthcoming book "Punishment and Inequality in America" (Russell Sage Press). These are more than double the rates for white and Hispanic men.

Mr. Holzer of Georgetown and his co-authors cite two factors that have curbed black employment in particular.

First, the high rate of incarceration and attendant flood of former offenders into neighborhoods have become major impediments. Men with criminal records tend to be shunned by employers, and young blacks with clean records suffer by association, studies have found.

Arrests of black men climbed steeply during the crack epidemic of the 1980's, but since then the political shift toward harsher punishments, more than any trends in crime, has accounted for the continued growth in the prison population, Mr. Western said.

By their mid-30's, 30 percent of black men with no more than a high school education have served time in prison, and 60 percent of dropouts have, Mr. Western said.

Among black dropouts in their late 20's, more are in prison on a given day — 34 percent — than are working — 30 percent — according to an analysis of 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley.

The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large share of any earnings could be seized.

About half of all black men in their late 20's and early 30's who did not go to college are noncustodial fathers, according to Mr. Holzer. From the fathers' viewpoint, support obligations "amount to a tax on earnings," he said.

Some fathers give up, while others find casual work. "The work is sporadic, not the kind that leads to advancement or provides unemployment insurance," Mr. Holzer said. "It's nothing like having a real job."

The recent studies identified a range of government programs and experiments, especially education and training efforts like the Job Corps, that had shown success and could be scaled up.

Scholars call for intensive new efforts to give children a better start, including support for parents and extra schooling for children.

They call for teaching skills to prisoners and helping them re-enter society more productively, and for less automatic incarceration of minor offenders.

In a society where higher education is vital to economic success, Mr. Mincy of Columbia said, programs to help more men enter and succeed in college may hold promise. But he lamented the dearth of policies and resources to aid single men.

"We spent $50 billion in efforts that produced the turnaround for poor women," Mr. Mincy said. "We are not even beginning to think about the men's problem on similar orders of magnitude."

I have to agree wholeheartedlywith EMS that hip hop is solely to blame. Remember the 80's when metal espoused pretty much the same ethics? Man, White people really fell off then. There aren't any other truly relevant factors; I say we blame hip hop. The Katrina stuff went down after Hot 97 did their "Tsunami Song." Coincidence? No!

^LOL -- I know a whole lotta sh!t we can blame on country music...

I wish I could put some money on McWhorter.

Nice bait, Smooth.

But no one is going to tie this into Hip-Hop. And my man Bill Cosby ain't crazy either.

The data they presented go well above and beyond entertainment's influence.

If some foaming at the mouth academic begins spewing "hiphop is the blame" type nonsense, he or she would only be written off as someone who dudn't (misspelling intentional) really care anyway.

This indeed is a heartbreaking issue. And although it is not HipHop related I appreciate you bringing it to light.

But just in case there does happen to be a traitor in our midst who wants to blame the youth's form of self-expression, I have to be proactive and mention that this deeprooted problem of self-hate goes way back to the Willie Lynch syndrome (do a google search on the name for an unpleasant surprise).

Later, I'll share my theory (which I sincerly hope is wrong) on why Black men don't care.

-Black People

So many people are misreading or maybe just reading too much into that article. The war or drug and the bias in the criminal justice system are the biggest culprits. Among others.......

how could you forget Bill O'Reilly?

I'll respect Cosby when he starts making SENSE.

I suggest we read this before we go nuts about the william lynch item

http://manuampim.com/lynch_hoax1.html

The authenticity of the speech is not important. The effects and notions that it suggests are what are vital.

Sorta like the piece entitled "Kudos to Black People".

Same type of thing.

Doesn't matter if the writing was fake.

The message was and is real.

-Black People

Willie Lynch thinking weakens our communities.

Too late--the dean of Columbia U's social work program ALREADY attributed this to hip hop on Brian Lehrer (and of course fatherless households, the other favorite Moynihan Report specter they like to fetishize...)

Who do you blame? Hip hop derived from the very reasons behind life in the hood. So if there is any hope and faith for our brothers a rebirth is in order. It is always darkest before the dawn. If we are going to point fingers then we need to look in the miror and ask what did I do when I got mine and left the hood? We don't feel we have any community obligation anymore, moving into neighborhoods where we're hardly welcome is that arriving? Shame on us. We will never be that free if we don't pick each other up.

Here it is:

"A Povert of the Mind", Orlando Patterson

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/opinion/26patterson.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

"SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the 'cool-pose culture' of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black."

And the winner is....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/opinion/26patterson.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&incamp=article_popular

So where and when do you begin to operate? I say first grade. It is what they are being taught or not taught. they need to see themselves reflected in a positive way early on or else they will have a negative effect on themselves later. As far as that article it mentioned black children have a high amount of self esteem that is contradictory when they're run'in around in the streets aimlessly. It is all an act. Black children want the same respect and advances as white children and it appears if you don't play sports or are musically inclined you're just out of luck. Is that all to hope for? Basketball, Football or Rap music?

Whoops, looks like I posted around the same time as you, Mr. Jones.

I could go into each and every item in Mr. Patterson's article that IMHO is a bunch of BS (his stating that the unemployed in Latin America and India don't turn to crime on the same scale as African Americans is particularly laughable), but I'm sure that enough incensed NY Times readers are already responding to the editors w/ their own two cents.

I have no patience for pseudo-intellectual pundits who are looking for quick-fix answers and easy scapegoats!

PSEUDO-intellectual? You must have an awfully high standard:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/patterson/

And "laughable", you say? Well unemployment (not to mention wages) is far worse in India and Latin America than it is here, and these are the stats:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/r88.pdf

Come on folks, let's see some substantive arguments out there.

He's not a "Pseudo-intellectual":

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/patterson/

And he's right about crime amongst the unemployed in India and Latin America. They have higher unemployment, lower wages, and these are the crime stats:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/r88.pdf

He doesn't suggest any quick fixes and he doesn't scapegoat anyone. In fact he also blames the larger mainstream culture as well as the "brutalized past" of African Americans over generations.

Will,

OK, maybe "pseudo intellectual" was a bit overreaching because I'm more than a little pissed at this guy's pedantic tone and, quite frankly, weak arguments. However, a faculty position at Harvard does not an "expert" on the fate of Black men in America make. (Or any subject for that matter-- may I remind you that the ex-president of that esteemed institution was a bit of an ignorant jackass himself.)

As for the stats you provided, they simply provide an overview of the prison population in each country as compared to the general population of that country. Where does it detail the nature of the crimes committed or the demographic breakdown of those imprisoned? Considering the proliferation of drug cartels, child prostitution rings and violent crimes that are well-documented in Latin America and India (not to mention Russia, which according to the stats you provided has the highest prison rate in the world), I stand by my contention that Patterson's assertion is weak. And the confidence with which he he uses it to make his case -- that young Black men are somehow more preoccupied with being "cool" than advancing in life -- is laughable.

Respect,

K

Right On Kami!!! Nuff said.

Are you guys still there?

I have a disturbing theory that I'd like to run by you for your input.

-Black People

F--k What You Heard About Black Males from the NYTimes-Steal this article!
By Omowale Adewale (formerly L. James)

I heard y'all bombarding my email with the New York Times' article on the plight of the black male and your own analysis and your friend's analysis, and frankly, it bothered me. I'm good though. I'm straight. I just wanted to enter into the discussion.

They said "he was a case history, as well as an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose�his ruthless and fanatical belief in violence�marked him for fame, and for a violent end�he did not seek to fit into society or into the life of his own people�The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still with his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of that darkness that he spawned and killed him."

The New York Times, "the best daily paper in the country, in the world�urbane, sophisticated, liberal on certain civil liberties and civil rights questions," their mask slipped on February 22, 1964. This is how they described our Honorable Brother Malcolm X, our beloved Black Prince on day after he was shot. The leader of black males, the very working class and poor black males described by the Times on March 20, 2006. The leader in which SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and the Black Panther Party both revere for providing them with their initial political science and courage to organize black people to defend against white American lynchings, fire hoses, dogs, discrimination, and America's systemic attacks. The Times pumped more lead in El Hajj Malik El Shabazz through each line they wrote the very next day after his first assassination. And, I am supposed to take their information packaged and sold to us under the guise of scholarly studies from Columbia,
Princeton and Harvard for gold?

Already, some black intellectual is doing white power's work and dissecting my words and concluding, "Their information is still true." Nah, homey. It's not. Statistics might be, though. Author of "the Debt" Randall Robinson explained so eloquently that "a little learning is, as they say, a dangerous thing, and particularly when it is presented, like a severely cropped photograph, as an independent truth. And I do not believe as a general matter, such truncated analyses are innocently delivered by white establishment academics." Interestingly enough, but hardly coincidental he his commenting on another New York Times article about blacks falling behind in 1998. I believe we see a pattern here, John!

The best tactic the government and media ever used (and I mean they did spend billions of dollars on hundreds of agencies and organizations to complete its strategy) is the strategy of making young brothers feel like they are responsible for their current conditions. 50CENT hasn't been out more than five years in the media and we think he created the black villain in New York. We fault 50CENT more than we turn our waving fingers at the music groups that own the labels that own him. Meanwhile, folks are convinced that a nation, which stole land and murdered millions and enslaved millions for 300 years can't possibly be this diabolical.

Yes, black males are heading to prisons at astronomical rates and unemployment among black men is above the roof. However, I don't buy the ivy-league's solutions or conclusions or the New York Times story because they inexplicably and cautiously relate the reason for black male's crisis to the fault of black men themselves. "In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills � like parenting, conflict resolution and character building � as they are on teaching job skills." This quote in the Times article clearly suggests Blacks are messed up because we are bad parents, are irrational people, can't get jobs because we don't know anything, and we are just plainly bad people.

The poor statistics of black men in the US has always been a picture worth strong solutions. The difference was that Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and even Huey P. Newton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. never summed up black male oppression as something that we spawned. Not even remotely! Whether they preached non-violence or the right to defend yourself they always gave you clarity on the black current situation in America. They never blamed us for being apart of the poorest and most discombobulated communities. Harriet Tubman saw probably the most backwards of black men in their desire to stay enslaved instead of risking being free. She understood that that backwardness was always connected to white power's attempt to justify black slave's position in society and if it failed, white power frightened you beyond belief. The problem was always summed up as white power is the enemy and that it maintains power at the expense of the African. Whether it's wrestling Hip-Hop away and using it's human and financial resources against us and for themselves, taking advantage of slavery and prison labor, or crushing the urge and the ability for uprising, black people have been the pedestal.

Am I supposed to believe after 300 years of slavery and 46 years of Jim Crow that now I am responsible for black males being 1 million locked up? Am I supposed to think that the reason young black males are mad ass hell and selling drugs because we don't mentor enough black children? Am I supposed to believe that the CRIPS (Community Revolutionary Interdisciplinary Program Service) and the Bloods created the conditions that force me to live from check to check? The fact is that black people were awarded Civil Rights 42 years ago by the same government that launched a war on us.

In the 1920's, remnants of COINTELPRO began forming from the young J. Edgar Hoover. His first task was to crush the Black Star Line and send one of the most powerful black men in America and his African internationalist ideas back to which they came. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, leader of millions in the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) was deported to Jamaica under a form of counterinsurgency used by the United States government. The UNIA had 700 branches in 38 states.

That same counterinsurgency finally took on the name called COINTELPRO in 1956 and was responsible for the deaths of 27 known Black Panther Party members and several others are still locked up as political prisoners, which are mostly men. The Black Panther Party had taken self-determination into their own hands and into black communities. Lead by mostly black males, but transcribed to me by my mother Cleo Shivers a teenage Black Panther organizer from 1969-1971. She explained to me the daily food being given out to the black community at the Sutter office in Brooklyn and the free clinic that treated the black community. The songs and poems she recited and the rallies described so detailed and vividly made me imagine the greatest zeal and love black people ever had for us in this nation. We were proud, although we were going to jail for our rebelliousness. The difference is we were politically clear on why and how we got there!

The conditions are still the same but black people's political clarity changed with COINTELPRO's successful execution, a US counterinsurgency program that murdered, imprisoned, misdirected, discredited, and disrupted the revolutionary, its spirit and potential revolutionaries to come. In 1969 the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that his investigation of the Black Panther Party revealed that in his city, at least, the Black nationalists were primarily feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying the career ambitions of the agent were directly related to his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the BPP was "a violence prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means". J. Edgar Hoover said if you are going to be a revolutionary, you are going to be a dead revolutionary. The very people who admitted to killing our leaders and brandishing them as violent and hateful in our mourn for them now find themselves articulating the depths of our despondency. Find their half attest to these claims in the Freedom of Information Act.

Black men are not in the poor conditions in America because of natural conditions, bad habits, because of fatherlessness, because some are stuck on a sixth grade reading level, or because they are helpless recidivists or even because the US government doesn't intervene effectively. We are facing these very issues because America's imperialism requires young black male's incarceration; it requires the petty bourgeoisie black males to offer up solutions that point to the government as the problem-solvers and the black working class and poor peasantry as the problem-makers. There is a very real and material obstacle preventing black men from becoming Marcus Garvey's, Malcolm's, and Huey's. The reason why black men suffer is because the US government DOES intervene in our community. Everyday, the police squad car patrols the black community waiting for the slightest reason to throw us in jail and extract labor and inject despair. Elected officials in our community get their positions at our expense because they are complicit.

At the juncture in which the black working class and poor begin to show insurgency due to their conditions such as the 1992 rebellion in Los Angeles, CA after the LAPD's beating of Rodney King, the 1996 rebellion in St. Petersburg, FL after the police shooting death of Tyrone Lewis, the 2003 rebellion in Cincinnati, OH for the deaths of five unarmed black men by police in a five month period, and the Benton Harbor, MI rebellion in 2003 after a black motorist was killed when a police car pursued him the government increases counterinsurgency methods. Although, these are sporadic uprisings, it is a strong cause for concern for the government. It is also an explanation for counterinsurgency's maintenance. Yet, they flood our neighborhood because of possible rebellions, they say it's because they're fighting gangs, drugs, or poverty for our own good or for our quality of life. Counterinsurgency carries out in the form of eliminating black youth from the streets at disastrous levels. Right now in the South Bronx you have the poorest congressional district in the nation, in addition to it being one of the neighborhoods in the country with the highest levels of youth incarceration. There is no coincidence between incarcerated youth and its connection to poverty no more than there is a coincidence for rebelliousness found in black youth that live under the harshest conditions in the US. In reality, we've been living under the same climate for 400 years, non-stop.

The New York Times article was an attack. It was a rap sheet on the black male in America executed in public cold-blooded fashion. It spoke nothing of the arrest-quota-driven police targeting black neighborhoods, which has been corroborated by PBA President Pat Lynch. The article spoke nothing of Bill Clinton's dismantling of welfare (less than 2% of the government budget), which systematically separates the black male their families. Not to mention Clinton's heinous sponsorship of the most punitive crime bill in history, support for more paramilitary police, and his administration's investment in prisons that reported an economic boom for whites and a decline for blacks in 2001. Countless black and Latino women have visited my office confiding that their social worker suggested they'd get public assistance if they managed to divorce their husband.

Last year, I went to the Old Navy in Harlem to handle an issue and witnessed almost 20 young black men within an hour, most likely unfamiliar to each other's pursuit, walk in and out looking for employment positions. What they didn't know that some employees are clear on is that you better act white and change your tone when you speak. Have you ever observed black men in Old Navy or other big department stores? It's like seeing the results of American black male emasculation. Either that or find yourself being discriminated against, but given some bulls_it reason on why you're not qualified to sell clothing. Those with criminal records rarely bother in that sector.

As a person who has been to family court countless times for my daughter I witnessed what many will never believe because they continue to retrieve all their information from a racist media. I personally had to fight three years for the system to recognize a costly glitch in the system while hearing other men suffer worse accounts. There are honest brothers overpaying child support by the thousands, as there are definitely some brothers under paying by gross amounts. I was shocked and embarrassed by my own shock that several black men were OVER paying child support that sometimes never reached the mother. In most cases like mine, the Child Support Enforcement agency are never on the same page as Family Court so you are regarded as a deadbeat and end up further in arrears. Luckily for me I had the flexibility and the resources of a government entity to go to court three years to put them on the same page. One non-custodial brother was fired because of this mishap, threatened !
with jail time with only weeks away from homelessness and forced to pay a five-figure amount to Child Support Enforcement. I can't tell you how many times I was hung up on seconds into discussion because I was labeled as a deadbeat. I am reminded of a lawyer that explained that the reason courts started using metal detectors wasn't because of serial killers, gangsters, rapists, but because some fathers who had no visitation rights had a earnest and most brazen-red desire to see their children.

Luckily, for me there is no problem in seeing my child. But, I'll make sure to inform her that you cannot leave it to this current media to explain your husband, father, uncles or brothers. Otherwise, you'll get the most diabolically concocted analysis and racist psychological babble that leaves the black petty bourgeoisie stuck vilifying themselves and other Africans. The problem is not black youth's rebelliousness; the problem I see is that Africans own less than 1% of the entire media and no percentage in the US government, only the appearance. We must learn even as we are under attack daily to stop continuing to sum up our conditions, as not only our own fault but also something new and fresh. Everything, black people and all others peoples are tied to a dialectical and historical process in which eras and events are interconnected even as things die and come anew. Hopefully. A revolution.

Omowale Adewale (27) is the co-founder and executive director of G.A.ME. He is a senior staff member for an elected official in the Bronx, member of the Uhuru Movement and FAR Fund Fellow. He drew national acclaim in his first visit to Nigeria in 2005 speaking on issues ranging from Hip-Hop to healthcare to self-determination for all Africans.

--
Freedom/Uhuru/Ominira
Omowale Adewale
Executive Director
G.A.ME, Inc.
www.Kickgame.com
718-991-0671
917-239-8992

Damn! I shoulda read this shit a coupla days ago.

Peace to Omowale!!
I coudnta did no better.

Worve up.

-Black People

Gentlemen, I have read your comments. And I understand your concerns about plight of the black man in America. Everyone's mentioning all the symptoms, but not the root cause. Read Ephesians 6;12. Remember, it's hard to fight an enemy you can't see!

You can't be 37218 serious?!?