Colorlines Magazine articles from May 2008

Colorlines Magazine archives from May 2008

Talking with teens about race and sex.
May 1, 2008... THE THING ABOUT SEX is it's really confusing. Physically, it's an utterly basic act, of course, as essential and natural to human life as breathing. But there's so much more to it. The emotional roller coaster rides, the intricate details of...

Asking a Mexican.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... Thanks ColorLines for your article on Gustavo Arellano and his "Ask a Mexican" column [Jan/Feb 2008]. I check out the column once or twice a month and was one of those people who struggled to get his perspective at first. Now I get it 100...

What it means to be trans.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... I really appreciated and loved the article about poc trans folks and experiences of transitioning [Jan/Feb 2008]. I posted it and passed it around to my friends and fellow activists to help address the monstrous erasure of folks of color from...

In focus: stories of deportation.(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... WHERE: Putnam Valley, New York YA CHHAN WEEPS as she explains why her son, Chhoeuth Chhan, shouldn't be deported from the United States. She escaped with Chhoeuth from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1979 after three of her other children...

Children behind bars for life: a new report focuses on the youngest victims of mandatory sentencing.(NEWS)
May 1, 2008... PRISON CLOTHING WAS NOT MADE to fit 13-year-old bodies. The shirt drapes as it would on a wire hanger, and the pants engulf the legs as they would on a clown, shredded at the bottom to make room for the feet. The notion of incarcerating...

Are schools the next target of gentrification? Chicago has been closing public schools in the areas developers want.(NEWS)
May 1, 2008... THE CHICAGO BOARD OF EDUCATION has closed or is planning to shut down up to 70 schools. At the same time, 100 new schools are scheduled to open under the city's Renaissance 2010, a project spearheaded by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the...

Vietnamese to be deported.(NEWS)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... THE UNITED STATES has signed a repatriation agreement with Vietnam to deport legal permanent residents who have committed aggravated felonies. Nearly 8,000 Vietnamese Americans have been issued deportation notices, and according to ICE...

How Black is New Orleans? New census figures don't tell the whole story.(GULF COAST UPDATE)(Report)
May 1, 2008... IT WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE ACCURATE of Mayor Ray Nagin had he declared New Orleans a milk chocolate city rather than a chocolate one. The U.S. Census Bureau finally released numbers confirming what many people have already seen for themselves: the...

Homeowner crisis.(CHECK THE COLOR LINE)
May 1, 2008... The subprime mortgage lending crisis has been particularly devastating for people of color, who are three times more likely than whites to have a subprime loan. But just how much are we actually losing? According to United for a Fair Economy's...

For rent (Mexicans need not apply).(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)
May 1, 2008... YOU'VE FILLED OUT the rental application. You've paid for the credit check. That may not be enough to land you an apartment in Farmers Branch, Texas. The city council passed an ordinance in January requiring landlords to verify renters' legal...

Thanks, but no thanks.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)(W. Kennedy Boone on Black female attorneys)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... WASHINGTON COUNTY Circuit Judge W. Kennedy Boone called three Black female attorneys "the Supremes" in court and then advised their client that he would be better off consulting "an experienced male attorney." The judge was publicly reprimanded...

Higher asthma rates.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)
May 1, 2008... PUERTO RICANS LIVING in New York City suffer from asthma at a higher rate than whites and even other Latinos. According to a study released by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos at CUNY, the asthma rate for Puerto Ricans between the ages of...

Out of uniform, he was another Black man.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)
May 1, 2008... POLICE ARE INVESTIGATING the fatal shooting of Christopher Ridley, a Black 23-year-old Mount Vernon, New York police officer. Ridley was off duty and out of uniform in January when he tried to break up a fight. Police who arrived on the scene...

Spanish, French and Anishinaabemowin?(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)
May 1, 2008... REMEMBER WHEN LANGUAGE CLASSES were just a choice between Spanish and French? Now high schools in Harbor Springs, Michigan, will offer students a course in Anishinaabemowin, the native language of the local Odawa Indians. Principal Susan Jacobs...

Largest settlement for discrimination.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)
May 1, 2008... CHARLES DANIELS WAS AWARDED $2.5 MILLION by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its largest settlement ever for an individual racial discrimination case. Between 1999 and 2001, when Daniels worked as a Lockheed Martin aviation...

A step towards victory.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)(proposal for building an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... ACTIVISTS IN MECKLENBURG COUNTY, North Carolina, defeated a local proposal to build an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center for undocumented immigrants in town. Organizers from North Carolina's Grassroots Leadership...

Sanctuary on the way north.(READING BETWEEN THE HEADLINES)
May 1, 2008... JOSE LUIS GUTIERREZ, mayor of Ecatepec, Mexico, gives a whole new meaning to the term "sanctuary city." He has declared his city a refuge for immigrants from Central America who pass through on their way to the United States. Gutierrez has...

Reggie Walton: the federal judge who dropped the hammer on Lewis "Scooter" Libby explains his crusade against crack sentencing laws.(Q & A)(Interview)
May 1, 2008... In 2007, the U.S. Sentencing Commission shortened average sentences for crack offenders by two to three years and cleared almost 20,000 federal prisoners to petition for that reduction. You're known as a hard guy on the bench, particularly on...

Blog bits: we know how many blogs you have to read nowadays. So we've scoured the archives from our blog, racewire.org, and found these must-reads for you.
May 1, 2008... DEATH OF THE SCARY BLACK MAN AMY GOODMAN'S SHOW, Democracy Now!, featured a discussion recently with the Rev. Jesse Jackson that focused on race and the primary elections. Goodman kicked off the sequence with a clip of William Bennett...

The color of money: race not only matters--it determines whether you make a living wage.(TO THE POINT)
May 1, 2008... THE PROPONENTS OF "RACE NEUTRAL" policymaking got a boost from a Pew Research Center poll in November 2007. Among the most widely cited findings was this provocative nugget: 53 percent of Black respondents agreed that Blacks "who can't get...

We're here. We're sexual. Get used to it. Abstinence programs have failed teens of color. Now young people are telling adults to get out of the way of their sex education.
May 1, 2008... AS BEFITTING AN ARTICLE about schools, here's a pop quiz taken from the sex education website Teenwire.org: In 1937, studies claimed that nine out of 10 children caught masturbating were: a) severely punished; b) told they would go insane or...

My high school sex life: one teenager talks about getting it on, turning it off and charting her own course through a sexual coming-of-age.(FEATURE)
May 1, 2008... I'M JACQUELINE WASHINGTON, and I'm 18 now--late 18. I was born and raised in east Oakland, and I'm about to graduate from high school. My school's really large, and I don't like it; I'm a small-school person. I would say it's about 1,500 kids....

Risking it all to find safety: black and brown queer youth are desperately seeking space to love--and be loved. They'll do whatever is necessary to find it.(FEATURE)
May 1, 2008... JULIUS'S SHEER POWER is just unsettling. It starts with the 22-year-old's evident beauty--the bright smile, the cherub-like innocence of his round face, his smooth, dark skin and baby dreads--all of which work alongside a sharp, speedy mind and...

Power to the brown people: Vancouver's Desis rage against the deportation machine--and it works.(FEATURE)
May 1, 2008... IT WAS AN IMMIGRANT RIGHTS ORGANIZER'S dream come true. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On December 10, 2007, with just a few hours notice, close to 2,000 South-Asian Canadian immigrants flooded Vancouver International Airport. They paralyzed...

Spotlight: Sean Hill; Weaving hometown history into poetry.
May 1, 2008... Sean Hill grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia with stories about his family and the history of the town. But it wasn't until his twenties that the poet went to interview his grandmother and learned that McIntosh Street had once been a thriving...

A nuanced young black voice: novelist Kalisha Buckhanon complicates the image of Black teenagers.(PROFILE)
May 1, 2008... WHEN KALISHA BUCKHANON returned to the downstate Illinois town she had left many years earlier, the interval of time allowed her to observe her family with a fresh perspective. Having immersed herself for years in academic studies in New York...

The rise of street literature: the literary genre about "gangsta life" spawned a younger Black readership, but is this literacy by any means necessary?(TREND)
May 1, 2008... IN PERCIVAL EVERETT'S NOVEL Erasure, Thelonious Ellison is a college professor who writes novels that are more praised than read. His work's engagement with French post-structuralists and ancient Greek literature impresses and baffles...

The Book Of Life And Death: a Filipina working as a caretaker keeps a special photo album and a few secrets of her own.(FICTION)(Reprint)
May 1, 2008... EVER SINCE I left the Philippines to try my luck overseas, I've been lugging around a series of mismatched plastic-covered photo albums and scrapbooks I call the Book of Life and Death. When I start a new album, I tape a ribbon to the center...

Banished from home: a new documentary considers reparations and suggests how little has changed in more than a century.
May 1, 2008... IN HIS NEW DOCUMENTARY Banished, Black filmmaker Marco Williams weaves together a willfully forgotten American past from yellowed newspaper articles and oral histories. The omitted grievance is this: for decades after the Civil War, white...

Racism without racists? A new book tries to define discrimination and fails.
May 1, 2008... LAST YEAR, an editor from a women's magazine told a group of lawyers that Black women's hair was a beauty "don't" in the workplace. Outrage ensued. The woman apparently lost her job or resigned, and to make matters right (or at least to save...

A Handbook to the U.S.
May 1, 2008... PEOPLE WHO CROSS the border don't get a manual to explain how this country works. To combat this problem, immigrant rights attorney Silvia Pena has written and self-published a new, reference book in Spanish appropriately titled, ABC De...

Race riots: lessons learned.
May 1, 2008... THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. called riots the language of the unheard, but Janet Abu-Lughod has listened. In her new, thought-provoking book Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (Oxford University Press), the...

Digital racial interactions.(Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet)(Brief article)(Book review)
May 1, 2008... THE INTERNET, as an interactive medium, is a notoriously difficult space to contain. In theory, it is limitless. It shifts in tastes and moods at such a pace as to liken the attention spans of its users to those of children who get hyper after...

Bettye LaVette: The Scene of the Crime (ANTI-Records).(Sound recording review)
May 1, 2008... IN THE PAST TWO YEARS, a litany of popular-music magazines have run reviews both contextualizing and grounding Bettye LaVette's significance as an influential yet criminally ignored figure in 1960s soul music. On The Scene of the Crime, one...

Oxbow: The Narcotic Story (Hydra Head Records).
May 1, 2008... Fronted by tech geek/fight trainer/author/renaissance dude Eugene Robinson, the San Francisco-based Oxbow has garnered a well-deserved reputation for making compelling, complicated, boundary-smashing, experimental rock music and transcendent...

Money Mark: Brand New by Tomorrow (Brushfire Records).
May 1, 2008... Best known as the studio and tour keyboardist for hip-hop legends Beastie Boys, multi-instrumentalist Mark Ramos-Nishita has carved a niche as a session keyboard contributor with numerous art rock-jazz outfits (such as Banyan and the Omar...

Chiara Civello: Last Quarter Moon (Verve Forecast).(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... Born in Rome, Italy, and educated at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, 30-year-old Chiara Civello has made an impression on the international jazz scene over the past few years with her impeccable vocal phrasing, interpretations and...

I got arrested and it got me laid.(OFF COLOR)(political prisoners)
May 1, 2008... AS WE APPROACH CONVENTION SEASON, I am reminded of the last one. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Three years ago, after partying the night before the Republican National Convention with some friends at my on-again, off-again college...