Colorlines Magazine articles from March 2006

Colorlines Magazine archives from March 2006

Stormy weather.(Editorial)
March 22, 2006... At the end of last year, I started having a lot of dreams about water. In one dream, I watched from inside our house as black floodwaters rose up to the second-floor windows. In another, my sisters and I stood on the shore while giant waves...

A thoughtful look at abortion.(letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Ziba Kashef's thoughtful and respectful portrayal of Coral Lopez in "Her Body, Her Choice?" (Colorlines Winter 2005-2006) was a breath of fresh air. Through Coral's voice, Kashef offered readers an honest, compelling and informative article...

Social Security for spouses only.(letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... The Fall 2005 issue of Colorlines is, overall, very informative and well done. I noticed one small but important bit of misinformation that I am hoping you can correct or clarify in the next issue. On page 14, you feature a chart comparing the...

Chain gang construction at Wal-Mart.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... In Wisconsin, Wal-Mart is using a new strategy to keep wages down--prison labor. Inmates at the Fox Lake State Prison are building a Wal-Mart distribution center in Beaver Dam. Their average wage is about $9 an hour. According to a spokesman...

Cashing in on model minority myth.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Two Asian American sisters have written a field manual to "Asian parenting." In Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers--and How You Can Too, Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim shamelessly promote the virtues of a stereotypical Asian...

Clean the store but stay out of the country?(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Illinois Republican Jim Oberweis gained notoriety in 2004 when he ran hyperbolic anti-immigrant TV ads in an attempt to rally support for his U.S. Senate campaign. Defeated in the primary, he's back to run for governor this year. Undocumented...

Pinal county's more like penal colony.(Sheriff of Pinal County in Arizona)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... The Sheriff of Pinal County in Arizona is looking to hire more than 60 detention officers to staff an expanded adult jail--one of eight jails and immigrant detention facilities in the town of Florence, which has turned to prisons for economic...

Bridging divisions with Bruce Lee.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Torn by civil war, the Bosnian town of Mostar is hoping to reconcile intense ethnic divisions through a world hero, Bruce Lee. A life-size statue of the kung fu star was unveiled in the center of town. Young people around the world, including...

Howard U. students not backing down.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Hundreds of students at Howard University greeted Laura Bush last October with a large protest against the war in Iraq, the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina and federal cuts in education spending. The students were threatened with...

The whole world was watching.(San Jose State University in California)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... San Jose State University in California is now home to a sculpture commemorating the Black power protest of 1968 by a pair of American track stars at the Olympics in Mexico City. Tommie Smith and John Carlos created an unforgettable image when...

Colleges facing heat for mascots.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Last August, the NCAA banned the use of Native American mascots by college teams during post-season tournaments. The University of Illinois and Florida State University are just two of many universities that have shamefully continued using...

A way of life.(celebrating New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Kid Merv: I miss playing in New Orleans; there's not a day that I don't think about it. I miss the Second Line on Sundays after church and a spot in the Sixth Ward called Joe's. Every day, musicians go to Joe's to pick up gigs or have drinks or...

Newsflash: race and class matter; For a hot moment, race and poverty became a major story in the coverage of Katrina and the civil unrest in France. Did this lead to any change?(to the point)
March 22, 2006... It took two national catastrophes--Hurricane Katrina in the United States and the civil unrest in France--to focus the mainstream news media's attention on the ever-present problems of race and class in Western society. For a moment, it seemed...

Lessons from France: African activist Brima Conteh talks about the roots and reverberations of the unrest in Paris.(Interview)
March 22, 2006... Born in Sierra Leone and educated in the Ivory Coast and Morocco, Brima Conteh emigrated to France in the early 1990s. "I came over and the conditions here launched me," he says of his journey from translator to political activist and...

Watching the war on terror.(anti terrorism measures managed by Department of Homeland Security)
March 22, 2006... Cleared at the Airport On his way home to the United States from Canada in October 2005, Man-jit Singh was stopped at the airport with his family and held for three hours for questioning. Apparently, his name had matched one that was on an...

Leave us alone: a growing antiwar movement gains momentum.(news)
March 22, 2006... After three months of hard labor, Iraq war resister and former Navy petty officer Pablo Paredes considers himself a free man. Recruited in high school, he joined the Navy but refused to board his ship headed for Iraq. During the subsequent...

Limited assets: most states have regulations that shut out low-income workers from retirement savings.(news)
March 22, 2006... Millions of working poor who rely on food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of public assistance are liquidating their savings or abstaining from employer-sponsored retirement plans in order to meet average state guidelines limiting household...

Looking for common ground: Katrina exposed the racial fault lines of immigration politics that threaten to pit Latinos against Blacks.
March 22, 2006... If Congress' current proposals for immigration reform pass this year or next, would they help the immigrant workers now doing reconstruction on the Gulf Coast? What about the residents hoping to return home--what would these proposals mean for...

Imprisoned in New Orleans: the people wanted to rebuild. What they got instead were private security forces.
March 22, 2006... When Hurricane Katrina hit, there was no evacuation plan for the 7,000 prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison, the New Orleans city jail, generally known as OPP, or the approximate 1,500 prisoners in nearby jails. According to first-hand accounts...

Boat People: the Vietnamese community of the Gulf Coast were portrayed as hardy shrimpers who survived Katrina without government help. But that's not the whole story.
March 22, 2006... Maybe it was a window of just a day or two, but as the very first news reports of broken levees and massive flooding came in, there was a moment when it was yet unclear who, exactly, the overwhelming victims of Katrina were to be. ...

Rebuilding on poisoned ground: amidst unprecedented toxic contamination, cleanup and rebuilding plans could worsen environmental racism in the Gulf.(IS IT SAFE TO REBUILD?)
March 22, 2006... At Momma D's home in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, a network of generators and car batteries powers several houses, a radio station, and--at night--a string of lights spanning the street between two live oaks. They're the only lights for...

The future of the Ninth Ward: organizers don't agree on what would be best.(IS IT SAFE TO REBUILD?)
March 22, 2006... While New Orleans was still submerged in water, business developer Pres Kabacoff suggested remaking the city into an "Afro-Caribbean Paris." One city official told reporters that New Orleans would now be the Hollywood of the South, a hotspot...

The inequality of suffering: global apartheid connects the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami.
March 22, 2006... In all of the reflection and analysis about Hurricane Katrina, one connection has not been made enough: the striking parallels with the tsunami from 2004, and the lessons to be learned from them. The thread that weaves New Orleans and the Gulf...

The white buffalo: in the small town of Denison, Iowa, a Native American legend comes to life.(feature)
March 22, 2006... WESTHOPE, N.D.--Between August 17 and September 2, 2002, four non-albino white buffalo calves were born on the ranch of Dwaine and Debbie Kirk. There were now some ten white buffalo in the American bison population of 350,000, according to Bob...

Prosecuted for race or religion? James Yee went from being the military's Muslim poster child to a suspect in the war on terror.(feature)
March 22, 2006... On a boiling November day in 2002, Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain in the U.S. Army, arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba from his permanent base at Fort Lewis, Washington in the cool environs of the Pacific Northwest. At Guantanamo, the U.S....

My family: watching her parents in action after the earthquake in Pakistan, she relearned the most important lessons of organizing.(feature)(Column)
March 22, 2006... On October 8th, a 7.6 earthquake radiated through Kashmir and the North West Frontier Province. A total of 3.5 million people lost their homes and more than 87,000 people lost their lives. Among the many places that were devastated was Oghi, a...

The next frontier for economic justice: with remittances to Mexico becoming a big business, immigrants begin to take a hard look at the companies that profit.(feature)
March 22, 2006... "Who here is rich?" asks Francis Calpotura, looking out at a dozen shivering Mexican immigrants seated in the basement of Saint Agatha's Catholic Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Men and women, still wearing winter jackets due to a...

The book biz: in Toronto, a women's bookstore beats the odds armed with committed politics and a savvy business plan.(feature)
March 22, 2006... At the Toronto Women's Bookstores 32nd anniversary party, there's free barbeque in the backyard and a line around the block. On the eighth day of a heat wave that's blanketed the city with smog, the joint is packed with customers chatting,...

Studying sex: a one-of-a-kind college course is helping to transform the burgeoning field of sexuality studies.(feature)
March 22, 2006... In a large classroom packed with students, Professor Nick Baham is teaching a course called African American Sexuality. The course has been taught here in the Ethnic Studies department of California State University-East Bay (formerly...

Saints of Venezuela: reclaiming the religious fiestas of slaves.(culture)
March 22, 2006... As a child growing up in the barrios of west Caracas, Venezuela, during the 1950s, Williams Ochoa heard the elders describe the religious fiestas that took place in the rural provinces. Their stories of worshipping saints with elegant costumes...

Black men, Asian women: exploring fantasy and reality, starting with TV hospital dramas.(culture)
March 22, 2006... As a South Asian woman with a long and pluralistic dating history, I am amazed these days to see two couples comprised of Asian women and Black men every week. The sugary romance between the excessively noble characters played by Parminder...

Seeing and remembering: Rene Yung's art installations set out to capture experiences of migration.(culture)
March 22, 2006... At first glance, artist Rene Yung's solemn yet intimately familiar mixed-media installations appear to address the idea of diaspora--particularly considering Yung's work with immigrant communities, which has inspired some of her most...

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus By Charles C. Mann Alfred Knopf, New York: 2005 The history of American Indians I learned in school--to the extent that I learned anything at all--was so wildly off the mark...

Little Brother: The Minstrel Show (Atlantic).(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... The Raleigh, North Carolina-based Little Brother has been a huge critical success of the past several years following their independently released sets, The Listening and The Chitlin'Circuit 1.5. Though many fans feared that they would lose the...

Madeline Bell: Doin' Things (RPM/Cherry Red).
March 22, 2006... Familiar to most U.S. audiences as the female lead on Joe Cocker's cover of The Beatles hit "A Little Help From My Friends," UK soul icon Bell released three hugely popular solo LPs in the United Kingdom and is still an in-demand session...

Fatlip: Theloneliest Punk (Delicious Vinyl).
March 22, 2006... The long-awaited debut from the former member of the groundbreaking early 1990s foursome The Pharcyde is arguably his best work ever. Fatlip's rasps and blues-shouts his way through funny and painful stories detailing a major-label career...

Sol Edler: Song of Solomon (Bolamarge Entertainment).(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Maryland native Sol Edler cut his teeth as a background singer in the Washington, D.C. music scene and had made a name for himself in that role when he decided to step up as a lead vocalist--and it's a wonderful thing that he did....

Measuring a year in the life: what else can I do to get Black folks to care about the AIDS epidemic?(transformations)
March 22, 2006... I just saw Rent, the much anticipated movie adaptation of Jonathan Larson's 1996 Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock opera about a year--"five hundred, twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes"--in the life of a group of friends, some of whom...