Colorlines Magazine articles from July 2006

Colorlines Magazine archives from July 2006

A change is coming.(periodical publishing )
July 1, 2006... THIS ISSUE MARKS THE EVOLUTION of ColorLines from a quarterly to a bimonthly. The spruced-up design and the new schedule simply provide you more of the ColorLines content you've come to expect--thoughtful, timely analysis of the most important...

Our rant on PETA garners rants.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... I completely disagree with the recent "rant" [Winter 2005] about an exhibit promoted by PETA to end oppression of humans and animals. PETA's display simply shows the similarities between past abuses to humans and current abuses to other...

... and raves.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... As someone who was deeply offended by the images shown by PETA, I commend your rant. Animals are treated cruelly. I support the plight for non-cruel treatment of animals. My concern, however, is the effect of equating the history of chattel...

Required reading.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... Thank you for including the "The Book Biz" article on the Toronto Women's Bookstore in the Spring 2006 issue of Colorlines. As a member of the Lucy Parsons Center, an all-volunteer, collectively-run, radical bookstore in Boston, the article has...

Reader's corner.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... OUR FIRST MAJOR READER SURVEYS told us lots about our loyal readers. Sixty percent of you are people of color and mixed-race. You most likely have a college degree, are between 18 and 45, and your main priorities are racial and economic justice...

Touring disaster: does viewing the devastation in New Orleans help?
July 1, 2006... "I WANT AS MANY PEOPLE TO COME visit here as possible." one Lower Ninth Ward resident remarked, walking past the infamous breached levees and destroyed homes of his neighborhood. "The national media has forgotten us, the politicians in D.C....

Hurricane Katrina index.(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... IN APRIL, with just weeks left to go before hurricane season, President Bush and Congress were still fussing about how much funding to give New Orleans for reconstructing levees. Here's some of the story in numbers: $2.035 billion: The...

Countering genocide: the growth of the movement to protect Darfur.
July 1, 2006... AS THE GENOCIDE in the western region of Sudan persists, now in its third year, the voices of concerned Americans have been raised, reflecting a movement that is both expansive and diverse. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Since this genocide...

Ourprotest.com: Latino teens used cell phones and MySpace.com to mobilize.
July 1, 2006... NAYDALLI HARO GOT HER CELL PHONE three years ago as a high school freshman. Mostly, she would text message her mom asking to be picked up. This year, however, the 17-year-old student organizer got a different message from friends that basically...

Breast cancer deaths higher for Black women.(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... RESEARCHERS HAVE NOW EXAMINED RACE, socioeconomic status and patient survival in 20 breast cancer studies and found that Black women are 19 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than white women regardless of how well-off or poor the...

Crackdown on playing soccer.(illegal immigrants )(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... While legislators debated immigration reforms in Congress, police arrested eight Latino day laborers who were playing soccer on a field near an elementary school in Brewster, NY. The men were charged with trespassing, and one from Guatemala was...

Off the reservation.(George W. Bush's budget)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... President Bush has proposed eliminating all funding in his 2007 budget for health clinics that serve Native Americans in urban areas. Under federal law, the U.S. government has a "trust responsibility" for Native Americans, which includes...

Civil rights leader now shilling for Wal-Mart.(Wal-Mart Stores Inc.)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... While the national media is drawing attention to criticisms mounted against Wal-Mart, the company has signed up a civil rights era figure, Andrew Young, to support the continued expansion of the world's largest corporation. Young, a former aide...

Planning any Latin American coups?(Immigration and Customs Enforcement, KBR Inc.)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... With immigration debates in the news, KBR, a subsidiary of Dick Cheney's old Halliburton firm, has a $385 million contract to build detention and deportation facilities for detained immigrants. According to U.S. Immigration and Customs...

Disappearing diversity scholarships.(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Under pressure from the federal government and fearing lawsuits claiming "reverse discrimination," colleges have begun offering white students the fellowships and scholarships intended to increase racial diversity. Of the 42 scholarships once...

The lion sleeps well tonight.(Solomon Linda's 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight')(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Descendants of the South African man who wrote the 1939 song that became known as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" won a huge share of royalties from the song that has been covered countless times and appeared on the soundtracks of at least 15 major...

Somalis demand equal access to education.(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... After a community of Somali immigrants filed a civil rights complaint, the public school district of Springfield, Mass., has agreed to improve the quality of education for Somali students. The district will hire additional bilingual tutors and...

$300,000 closer to accountability.(Ehab Elmaghraby)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Although thousands of Muslim, Arab and South Asian men were arrested, detained and deported in post-9/11 sweeps, Ehab Elmaghraby has accomplished what none of the others has thus far--winning a $300,000 settlement from the U.S. The Egyptian...

Stop evicting immigrants.(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... The Long Island town of Farmingville has been the site of intense battles between local residents and immigrant workers. While violent attacks and hate crimes directed at day laborers have gained notoriety for Farmingville, local officials...

Tracking Mexican terrorists.(police departments using criminal database to deter terroists)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... IN 2002, THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE began adding immigration violations--like overstaying a visitor's visa--to the FBI's national crime database, claiming that local police could help deter terrorists. But a new report by the Migration Policy...

Brit charges institutional racism.(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... IN AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED BY THE U.S. ARMY, a senior British officer criticizes the army for cultural insensitivity in Iraq that "arguably amounted to institutional racism." Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who served as deputy commander of a...

First official suicide letter.(Jumah Al Dossari)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... IN MARCH, THE GOVERNMENT DECLASSIFIED THE FIRST SUICIDE LETTER written by a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. Jumah Al Dossari, who has been detained for four years and has begged his attorneys to get him out of isolation, has attempted suicide 10...

Arrested for musical taste.(Harraj Mann )(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... BRITISH POLICE DETAINED AN INDIAN MAN at an airport on the suspicion that he might be a terrorist after he asked a cabdriver to play some songs on the car's radio from his MP3 player. The songs included one by the Clash whose lyrics included...

Rev. Timothy McDonald: the progressive minister advocates gay rights, but not marriage.(Interview)
July 1, 2006... EARLIER THIS YEAR, your church, the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta, hosted a summit where activists and ministers from around the country discussed how to make Black churches more inclusive of gays and lesbians. What was the most...

Marching in step with history: the immigrant rights movement on the global stage.
July 1, 2006... THE MARCH WAS LESS THAN HALFWAY DONE when my aging knees began to swell. I'd lost my contingent from Oakland, and was marching with Leo and his family from Sacramento. I was drawn to the sign he was carrying that read, "History Says Immigration...

Disastrous inequality: when a disaster strikes in Southern California, the effects to residents will be devastating, and even more so to the region's poor.
July 1, 2006... SEVERAL MONTHS AGO IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, a televised emergency announcement came on Channel 7 at 7:30 pm. The announcement urged residents to prepare to evacuate in 20 minutes because of a tsunami warning following an earthquake north of...

Ruin, Rubble & Race.(disaster relief )
July 1, 2006... IT'S AS IF THE SPOTLIGHT that Hurricane Katrina cast on the inequities of disaster relief never happened. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] San Francisco's high and mighty arc in full-throated self-celebration of the...

Prepare for the worst.(planning)
July 1, 2006... THE BIGGEST THING THAT STRUCK ME WAS WHO GOT LEFT BEHIND. Before getting to New Orleans, we were pre-stationed in Houston out of the path of the hurricane. We happened to stay at the Sheraton and there we ran into a family from New Orleans. I...

Making a family: adoption is a pressing racial issue as more children of color are adopted by white parents.
July 1, 2006... IT'S HARD TO FIND A MORE LOADED TOPIC THAN TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION. Perhaps that's because the personal decision to have a family is an emotional one and we want to believe that institutional racism doesn't affect our choices. Perhaps it's because...

A fight for their lives: food and land struggles have connected peasant movements from Asia to Latin America and dogged the WTO across the globe.
July 1, 2006... WHEN LEE KYUNG-HAE, a 56-year-old Korean farmer and former president of the Korean Advanced Farmers Federation, fatally stabbed himself at the WTO meeting in Cancun in 2003, "WTO Kills Farmers!" became not simply a rhetorical rallying cry but a...

Conquest and compensation: Blacks and Native Americans haven't agreed on a reparations framework. It's time to change the debate.
July 1, 2006... "You can have the mule; but the 40 acres are ours." --Pamela Kingfisher (Cherokee) PAMELA KINGFISHER'S COMMENT, made in a dialogue between indigenous and African-descended peoples at the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in 2000,...

Racial alliances: differences can't be ignored and don't have to be divisive.
July 1, 2006... SHARING EXPERIENCES of oppression, in one form or another, provides the foundation for alliance-building between people of color. But, as the late and beloved Gloria Anzaldua said in her book Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras, "shared...

Sikhs and September 11: actor and director Kavi Raz's film The Gold Bracelet is the first of its kind.(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... SINCE HIS 1982 BREAKOUT ROLE on the hit show St. Elsewhere, Kavi Raz has appeared in more than 200 television shows, plays and films. He has appeared in leading roles on television shows, like M.A.S.H and NYPD Blue and is the first Sikh...

Listening up: music production has blossomed as a way for young people to tune out of corporate radio and into their own creativity.
July 1, 2006... ON A SUNNY SPRING DAY, Abdull Dominguez, aka "Panama," sits inside a black box recording studio at BUMP Records in Oakland, California. On his latest tracks recorded with his cousin, Rico Gilliam, Panama raps in Spanish, reflecting his identity...

La Cueva: the oldest Latino drag club in the country has done much to change attitudes in Chicago's Mexican community.
July 1, 2006... IT IS A.M. on a Saturday night, and the crowd at La Cueva is going wild. Lines form at the sides of the stage as adoring gay and straight men and women wait their chance to stuff bills in the gold-spangled bikini of a shapely transgender dancer...

Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption.(Book review)
July 1, 2006... WEAVING A FAMILY: UNTANGLING RACE AND ADOPTION By Barbara Katz Rothman Beacon Press, 2005 There is no way to have a conversation about race without skin color. However objective we may claim to be, an inevitable subjectivity...

Towards Land, Work and Power: Charting a Path of Resistance to us-led Imperialism.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2006... TOWARDS LAND, WORK AND POWER: CHARTING A PATH OF RESISTANCE TO US-LED IMPERIALISM By Jaron Browne, Marisa Franco, Jason Negron-Gonzales and Steve Williams Unite to Fight Press, 2005 IN SPITEOF ITS LONGISH TITLE, this book is...

ZaatarDiva.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2006... ZAATARDIVA by Suheir Hammad Rattapallax Press, 2006 ZAATARDIVA is the third collection of poetry by Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian-born New Yorker, award-winning poet and acclaimed performer from Russell Simmons' "Def Poetry Jam on...

American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2006... AMERICAN METHODS: TORTURE AND THE LOGIC OF DOMINATION By Kristian Williams South End Press, 2006 IN HORRIFYINGLY impeccable detail, author Kris-tian Williams argues that U.S. policymaking, even before Sept. 11, actually pivots on...

Candi Staton: His Hands (Honest Jons Records/Astralwerks/EMI).(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... REFERRING TO SINGER CANDI STATON'S six-decade-spanning career as varied would be like calling a dinosaur old. Beginning with her first work as a teenage member of the Jewel Gospel Trio in 1953 (an opening act for Sam Cooke's legendary Soul...

Athens Boys Choir: Rose Cuts The Cake (self-released).(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Slam poet whirlwind Gavin Katz continues to deliver the goods as a solo act in the follow-up to his debut (with former partner Rocket), Rhapsody in T. Katz delves into even more complex conversations on the government, maleness, transgender...

Various Artists: We Got The Fund; The Best of Funk (BMG Special Products).(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... BMG has a well-earned reputation for low-priced, well-packaged compilations of hard-to-find goodies. We Got The Funk continues this trend with a cross section of 1970s and early 1980s hit singles (Tom Browne's "Funkin' For Jamaica (NY)") as...

The Temptations: Gold (Motown/UMG).(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... The repackaging and re-release of work by artists of The Temptations' stature is nothing new in a music-industry where back catalogs are huge-cash cows. Gold, however, is a loving, painstakingly packaged music history lesson in a...

DMC: Checks Thugs and Rock 'N Roll (RomenMpire/Warner Music Group).(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Checks is the second solo CD released this year by a member of legendary hip-hop group Run-DMC (the first being Rev. Run's Distortion). While Run chose to continue the religious meditations and life-in-the-music-biz ditties he began recording...

Ntozake Shange and David Murray: Wild Flowers (self-released, limited edition/Killer Banshee Studios).(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2006... Award-winning playwright, novelist and poet Shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel) and ubiquitous tenor sax legend David Murray (World Saxophone Quartet) revisit...

Working new land.(immigrants)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Beatrice Neri, the daughter of Mexican immigrants who operate the Staten Island Family Farm, helps harvest vegetables early Saturday morning to take to market. Once the rush at the market subsides, the family starts a shift at a local pizzeria,...

They call me 'Mommy': but I'm still an outsider.
July 1, 2006... THEY CALL ME "MOMMY." I was expecting Auntie or sayama (teacher), or maybe Daw Rhoda or Daw May Than Kyi, my Burmese name from when I lived and worked in the country as a young woman. But they choose Mommy. It is startling; I shrink. Why?...