Black Children and Black History: The Importance Of Teaching Our Kids the Complexity Of Us

http://mybrownbaby.com/2013/03/black-children-and-black-history-the-importance-of-teaching-our-kids-the-complexity-of-us/

by Denene Millner

I was in the car headed to the Atlanta OneMillionRising rally with Mari and three of her female classmates, singing Prince’s “Adore” loud and off-key, when girlpie commandeered the radio dial in search of—what else?—hip hop. “I can’t believe you turned off Prince,” I sniffed. “Since your little friends are in the car, I’ll give you that, but please be aware: I’m not feeling Lil’ Wayne in general and, because of his nasty lyrics about Emmett Till, today I particularly don’t like his behind, so he will not be on my radio, please and thank you.”

“Wait, huh?” the girls asked, practically in unison. “What did he say?”

Typical. The girls had no clue that one of their generation’s most revered rappers was being called out by the Civil Rights icon’s family for comparing sex with the brutal, merciless beating that killed the then-14-year-old Till. For kids, that kind of news never appeals; they nod to the beat, Tweet about what Kim Kardashian did on her latest reality show, obsess over Mindless Behavior Instagram posts and ignore that which gets the adults all riled up. Never mind that, though: I was pissed and I wanted them to understand why they should be, too. “I mean, besides constantly making it seem like the only good sex is violent sex, this fool callously used the brutal murder of Emmett Till to describe what he’d like to do to a woman’s body. You should be infuriated.”

Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion Use Pro Slavery Argument Suggesting 14th amendment is unconstitutional

http://rawdawgb.blogspot.com/2012/06/justice-antonin-scalias-dissenting.html

by Torrance Stephens

With the recent ruling by the Supreme Court pertaining to the Arizona immigration law, most pundits have focused on the subject of the “show me your papers” clause. However, for African Americans what is more interesting and significant is the dissenting opinion proffered by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

In his own words, Scalia wrote: “Today’s opinion, approving virtually all of the Ninth Circuit’s injunction against enforcement of the four challenged provisions of Arizona’s law, deprives States of what most would consider the defining characteristic of sovereignty: the power to exclude from the sovereign’s territory people who have no right to be there,” Scalia’s opinion said.

Dozens Of Children Serving Life In Prison—How Do We Let This Happen?

http://mybrownbaby.com/2012/04/dozens-of-children-serving-prison-death-sentences/

 

By NICK CHILES

A report yesterday on CBS Sunday Morning revealed a factoid that stopped us in our tracks here at MyBrownBaby: There are more than 70 thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds in the United States serving sentences of life in prison—and nearly two-thirds of them are children of color.

We’ve written here about the American obsession with prisons and how shameful it is that our country has turned imprisonment into big business, using the incarceration of unprecedented numbers of black boys as a means of keeping afloat small towns all across the nation. As was reported in a recent expose in The New Yorker, more than half of all black men without a high school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives.