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Essence Hires White Fashion Director

Atlanta's Hottest Hip Hop — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:00:47 +0000

NewsOne is reporting that magazine Essence is set to formally hire Elliana Placas, a former staff member of O! Magazine and US Weekly.

The company that owns Essence, Time Warner, is reportedly behind the move to hire Placas as Fashion Director.

It is obviously too soon to know what backlash the magazine might suffer as a result of the decision, but it does raise some interesting issues.

Can a woman who is not black successfully coordinate the fashion orientation of an iconic magazine directed at black women?

Is it a slap in the face of the loyal readers of Essence to hire her? What direction will the magazine take in the near or long term future?

You can read more by clicking the link below.

Controversy Surrounds Essence Hiring White Fashion Director

VIDEO: Mary J. Blige Shows T.I. Some “Good Love” At Essence Music Festival

President Obama Calls Shirley Sherrod, Expresses “Regret”

Mark Allwood — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:35:16 +0000

From the New York Times:

President Obama on Thursday urged Shirley Sherrod, the black Georgia Agriculture Department official whose firing and subsequent offer of rehiring this week renewed a conversation about politics and race, to continue “her hard work on behalf of those in need,” the White House said.

Mr. Obama reached Ms. Sherrod by telephone at about 12:30 p.m., several hours after she had said on national television that she believed she deserved a telephone call from the president. They spoke for seven minutes, during which time Mr. Obama expressed to Ms. Sherrod his “regret” about the events of the last several days and emphasized that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “was sincere in his apology” for her initial dismissal.

Ms. Sherrod appeared on a round of morning talk shows the day after the White House and Mr. Vilsack apologized profusely and repeatedly to her for the way she had been humiliated and forced to resign after a conservative blogger released a misleading video clip that seemed to show her admitting antipathy toward a white farmer.

Ms. Sherrod, who until Monday was the rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia, said she was inclined not to return to the agency. Mr. Vilsack on Wednesday said that he would ask her to return to use her expertise to help move the department past its checkered history in race relations, but she told NBC’s “Today” that she did not want the burden of solving the department’s racial problems to rest entirely on her.

During that interview, held earlier in the day, she said that she would like to have a conversation with Mr. Obama but did not believe he owed her an apology.

“I’d like to talk to him a little bit about the experiences of people like me, people at the grass-roots level, people who live out there in rural America, people who live in the South,” she said. “I know he does not have that kind of experience. Let me help him a little bit with how we think, how we live and the things that are happening.”

The full video of Ms. Sherrod’s March speech to an N.A.A.C.P. gathering in Douglas, Ga., shows that it was a consciousness-raising story. Ms. Sherrod’s father was murdered in 1965 by white men who were never indicted; she spoke about how in response, she vowed to stay in the South and work for change. She married the Rev. Charles Sherrod, a civil rights leader and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Later, as director of a nonprofit group in Georgia formed to help black farmers, long before she went to work for the Agriculture Department, Ms. Sherrod received a request to help a white farm couple, Roger and Eloise Spooner, and she confessed in the speech that the request had given her pause. She did help them, however, and as the fracas over her firing became public this week, the Spooners came to her defense, saying Ms. Sherrod had gone out of her way to accompany them to see a lawyer and, in effect, had helped them save their farm.

“If we hadn’t have found her, we would have lost everything, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Spooner, 82, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Obama has shied from making race relations a major theme of his presidency, yet somehow racially charged controversies keep cropping up — as was the case last year, when the president said the Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. The upshot of that was the White House “beer summit,” in which Mr. Gates and the white arresting officer shared some cold beverages with Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In an interview Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Mr. Vilsack extended his public apology, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Mr. Obama should hold another summit with Ms. Sherrod and the Spooners.

“In the end, it’s such a redemptive storybook ending,” said Mr. Jackson, who has known Charles Sherrod for decades. “I wish that Shirley Sherrod and the Spooner family could be invited to the White House and give them the credit that they’re due, because it is a great American story. A rural white family in Georgia and a black woman, overcoming years of segregation. It would be great if the president were to seize this moment.”

Read the full story here.

Georgia Teacher Who Let Students Wear KKK Robes In Class Regrets Decision

Atlanta's Hottest Hip Hop — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:32:28 +0000

Lumpkin County High School history teacher Catherine Ariemma (Fox)

From the AJC.com:

Catherine Ariemma never intended for students to be offended by the sight of four Ku Klux Klansmen at Lumpkin County High School.

But that’s how senior Cody Rider said he felt last Thursday when he looked up and saw the students — dressed in white hoods and sheets — walking through the school cafeteria.

“I was outraged,” the 18-year-old mixed-race student told the AJC Monday night. “I was mad, so I started walking to them.”

A coach, Josh Chatham, intervened by grabbing Rider by the arm.

Ariemma, a six-year veteran with the Lumpkin County school system, said the students, who were working on a film project for her advanced placement U.S. history class, meant no harm.

She admitted that she may have made a mistake by letting the students film the Klan reenactment on campus.

“I feel terrible that I have students who feel threatened because of something from my class,” Ariemma told the AJC. “In hindsight, I wouldn’t have had them film that part at school.”

But the damage was done.

A report went to school officials, after parents of black students learned what had happened and called the district.

Ariemma was placed on paid suspension, and activist the Rev. Markel Hutchins was called to the town 50 miles north of Atlanta to help quell what seemed to be growing frustration among Dahlonega’s small African American community.

“When we leave this issue, we want to leave this town a better place,” Hutchins told a group of about 50 people who crowded into a tiny church Monday evening. “It seems to me that in many places around the country, we’re not divided as much as (we are) disconnected.”

And Rider, who was already in trouble for fighting at a football game last fall, needed help to calm himself.

“I wasn’t going to say anything to them,” Rider said, hinting he thought of taking other actions.

But Hutchins told reporters Monday evening during a meeting of concerned community members that Cody told him, “He wanted to swing on the students.”

Hutchins said if that had happened they might have gathered in Lumpkin County for a different reason.

Ariemma’s students were filming reenactments of various historical periods last week, and four donned Klan outfits, superintendent Dewey Moye told the AJC.

She said she walked with them through the cafeteria, but forgot students were there eating lunch.

“I told them, ‘I don’t want you to walk through the building by yourselves because I don’t want people to get the wrong idea,” Ariemma said. “I failed to think about that there was a lunch track in the cafeteria when they went by. Then I heard some students start giggling.”

Students saw her white-clad students, and Rider’s parents later complained about it.

“We determined, obviously, that she used extremely poor judgment,” Moye said.

Ariemma said she hopes something good can come from this.

“I asked Mr. Moye if there was some way we could turn this into a teachable moment,” she said.

Read the full story here.

CNN Study Shows That Children Are Racist

The Urban Daily — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:35:29 +0000

Are children color blind in America? CNN has come to the conclusion that a large percentage of them are!

CNN ran a pilot last night called “Black or White: Kids On Race” where they evaluated both white and black children on how they reacted to a color chart of cartoon kids:

They asked them questions like:

Who is the smarter child?
Who is the mean child?
Who is the ugly child?

Most of the children answered that the darker cartoon children were either mean, ugly and or dumb because of their skin color. CNN hired Professor Margaret Beale Spencer to analyze the results(she also designed he experiment). For the results watch the full episode tonight on CNN at 10pm.

*They tested 133 children from schools that met very specific economic and demographic requirements. In total, eight schools participated: four in the greater New York City area and four in Georgia.*

*Taken from CNN.com

With the media constantly reminding us of light skinned vs. dark skinned it isn’t surprising that children these days aren’t color blind.

What do you think?

GALLERY: Chocolate Girls Stand Up!

VIDEO: Does Hip Hop Like Light Skin Girls Too Much?

Anti-Abortion Billboards Invoke Race In Metro Atlanta

Denise Dunbar — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:22:16 +0000

VIA: New York Times

ATLANTA, GEORGIA — Anti-abortion groups have erected scores of billboards here with an alarming message: “Black children are an endangered species.”

The groups responsible insist that they are not exaggerating, despite contrary federal data. The billboards, which show a close-up of a worried-looking African-American boy, are an effort to highlight data showing that black women get a disproportionate number of abortions, especially in Georgia, and that the number in Georgia is increasing.

“The impact of abortion has become so great that it has begun to impact our fertility rate,” said Catherine Davis, the minority outreach coordinator for Georgia Right to Life, the state’s main anti-abortion group, which has sponsored the billboards in partnership with the Radiance Foundation, a group based in Atlanta that encourages adoption.

The billboards — there are 65 now and will eventually be 80, Ms. Davis said — were created in conjunction with a new Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com, which says that all of Georgia’s abortion clinics are in “urban areas where blacks reside.” The Web site connects abortion to segregation, saying that after the civil rights era, racists went “underground,” and that today “abortion is the tool they use to stealthily target blacks for extermination.”

It also says that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wanted to reduce the population of blacks, an assertion that Planned Parenthood has disputed.

Ms. Davis said Georgia Right to Life would also support state legislation that would make it a crime for abortion providers to solicit business based on the race or sex of the fetus.

In 2006, 57.4 percent of the abortions in Georgia were performed on black women, even though blacks make up about 30 percent of the population, according to the most recent figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control. Of the 37 states that reported abortion data by race, Georgia was second only to New York and Texas in the number of abortions performed on black women. Only Mississippi and Maryland reported a higher percentage of abortions going to black women than Georgia.

But there was little evidence that abortions had made black children unusually endangered. The fertility rate, or births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, among black women remains higher than the national average and has inched up in recent years, according to C.D.C. data.

The advertising campaign has drawn fire from supporters of abortion rights. Loretta Ross, the executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, said the billboards painted black women as either monsters intent on destroying their own race or victims of whites who control abortion clinics.

“The reason we have so many Planned Parenthoods in the black community is because leaders in the black community in the ’20s and ’30s went to Margaret Sanger and asked for them,” Ms. Ross said. “Controlling our fertility was part of our uplift out of poverty strategy, and it still works.”

Ryan Bomberger, who left his job in advertising to found the Radiance Foundation and who designed the billboard, argued that it was not intended to induce shame.

“This is not a campaign that targets black women,” Mr. Bomberger said. “It’s a campaign that exposes an industry that we believe targets African-Americans.”