In political news, a tweeter called funkywhitegirl posted these pictures: 1 2 3 of an anti semetic anti Cohen, pro Herenton flyer she received. Now, we don't need this sort of rhetoric. It's unnesscary to put down Jews to build up blacks. Let's start arguing about merits, not who is a Jew and who is a Christian.

Also,
1,500 come to a job fair at the library. Notice that a social worker[needing at least a bachelor's] can not find work, even at Walmart. I don't think this recession can be 'retrained' out of.

Dude, Cohen has sense. He knows that most of his district is not comprised of tea baggers, and many folks are pretty suspicious of their motives. For example, many of us are black, and have the good sense to realize that they weren't worried about the constitution or the deficit when a white dude was running up the credit card with two wars, and saying that it's cool to torture people. Many others have the sense to realize that rich leaders of corporations wouldn't pee on them if they were on fire. Even if they have the same skin color, profits are more important to those folks than people.

The comments here are sad. A few people are constructive, noting that children need fun activities, but many act like we should lock all children from ages 10 to 21 in the workhouse! When children go to the library, folks complain. When they go to the zoo, they complain. Man, it's like they really hate black children! The problem is that being a shitstain full of disdain for children who behave in any ways that are different from the documentary Leave it to Beaver is that it's tough to reach the youth that way.

I think people like that have given into a despair, and a nihilism that is the mirror of the nihilism and despair that some of our criminals show. By saying "it's just those bad teens who choose to be thugs", they not only other our teens, cutting them out of community, but also cut them out of our ability to make things better.

You don't have to be a parent to make life better for a child. Maybe it's by pursuing policies that make it easier for mothers, fathers, grandparents and other people raising children. Maybe it's by volunteering. Maybe it's merely encouraging your church or community center to have extra programs for the kids that aren't little and cute. But don't give up- children are part of this community too.

Today's complaint about the commercial appeal will be a mockery of a dumb letter to the editor. Stupid letter in bold.

Count on it. Every few weeks some white guy will make a dumb, insensitive remark about a black person. Count on this, also: Every few weeks Otis L. Sanford, your editor for opinion and editorials, will jump on these remarks and hint conspiratorially that whites have hardly moved out of the primeval slime of racism.

For the uninitiated, Otis Sanford is black. This may or may not matter. If something happens every few weeks, I can see why folks would still see a continuing problem with it. If I called the letter writer a dude with a very small penis every few weeks, you probably would not think "Man, Shannon has moved beyond her insulting people problem!" No, it would be, what's with her that she is constantly insulting the size of dude's organ?"


Since Sanford seems to have some general background feeling that he knows that most white people are still in the grips of racism, it would be interesting to ask him to name specific white people, other than politicians, that he knows to be racist. Perhaps as an expert on race, he could name, say, three dozen people right off the top of his head, but I think most of us would be hard-pressed to name even two or three of the opposite race who we know to be racists.

What's with this mess? I think the problem here is that we have different definitions of racists. Maybe this guy means dude with pointy hood, but I mean those people who are always calling people thugs and animals, making fun of how black people speak, and those folks who constantly defend racist idiots.


Of all the black people I have ongoing relationships with, I can't name a single one who seems to have any obvious objection to the fact that my skin is white, and I can't think of a single black person I know personally whose skin color is more than a trivial visual property to me. So I am inclined to wonder if these dumb remarks people make arise out of the vestiges of former mental attitudes rather being actual determinants for ongoing relationships.

LOLZ, he has BLACK FRIENDS!!! But seriously dude, why do you expect your 'black friends'- probably the post man and the dude at the desk across from you, to say? "Hey, dude! You're a whitey! LOLZ!"? And those former mental attitudes still hurt. When teabaggers call folks the n word, when folks hang nooses on campuses and make up outrageous lies about how they somehow are smart enough to go to college, yet so dumb they wouldn't think noose=symbol of hanging=bad idea even if I don't know racial history, it hurts people! A lot.

Sanford likes to drag out his favorite, time-worn, phrase that we -- meaning only whites, of course -- have a long way to go. Sanford might find it productive to spend a little honest effort examining the proofs of his dogma. He might discover that he's not really as expert on racism as he claims to be. If he keeps an open mind, he might even find out that he has almost as far to go as most of the rest of us.

This comes across as whining because some white folks might have to change their ways. If folks spent as much time actually changing their ways as they did about people saying 'hey, maybe you should', we'd live in a racial utopia.

Ok, I woke up in the middle of the night, and as usual, CA commenters need to be ashamed of themselves. A man is shot, and what do they do? They blame the area of town, 'thugs'[which apparently is anyone who likes gangsta rap. Dang! I just met with 15 'thugs' today! Ok, they were little children who were learning about science, but LOCK THEM UP! SCHOOLS DON'T NEED FUNDING NO WAYS!], and that we're not spending enough money jailing people. And of course, there's the good ol' folks just don't make enough effort. This man died tragically, and what do we hear? Folks running to get an opportunity to shit on neighborhoods they don't like, styles of music they don't like,etc. I don't see people shitting on single moms, which is a shocker, but maybe I missed something.

Of course, it's obvious that we could pretty much house most of the homeless. Housing stock stands empty right now here in Memphis, while we don't even have a free shelter for the homeless to stay the NIGHT in. People can build schools out of old office buildings, why not homes out of well...houses?



I'm against a school police force as well. Why criminalize our children? Why spend sorely needed money repressing kids in a model that would probably just make things worse?

Poor woman gets heating help- sadly people are OUTRAGED that people who need it get help instead of freezing in the snow. And the sad bit is that people act like the poor don't put anything in. Labor, payroll tax, sales tax and probably property tax this woman pays. And the three children are future producers and the young woman will probably [and probably has already] produced both labor, taxes and consumption, which people forget fuels the economy.

and all this without considering the moral value of not letting people freeze.

I'm not sure how two parent homes would have prevented this murder, but go on CA commentators! Also, I learn that if poor people didn't live in the city, there wouldn't be any crime...

Also, OMG, POOR FOLKS! I didn't know Memphis was that large, though.

For some reason, I'm not so sure that rounding up homeless folks using the police is the best approach. Many homeless people might be scared of the police. I think it's a shame that there's no free shelter in Memphis. The Peace and Justice Center is being slammed here for thinking long term, but sometimes you need to think long term.

Just having sweeps every time there's a frost doesn't touch the problem at all.

30% of children are in poverty in Memphis- Memphians' answers? complain about single moms. Hey you! YOU can mentor a child today!

The scoring on state report cards confuses me, personally.

People talk about achievement issues, in an unhelpful manner. Less bitching about the morals of other people/other people's children- more connections to mentoring or tutoring. Although with folks' funky ass attitudes, they won't be much help. They'll be the sort of people who think 12 year olds all go to school with shivs or the type of person who gives a little kid who wants some potato chips a lecture about how they should work for their potato chips or something.

So on second thought, bump that.

Colorlines wonders why film about poor black people by rich black people stays silent on the political realities of 1980s Harlem.

Is it me or is the rate of unemployment for black men without high school double the rate for white men without highschool?

High drop out rate not helped by our THEY JUST LAZY attitude.

Slactivists debate whether we should give a quarter to some drunk guy on the street or not.

Some dumbfuck police officer has sex with prostitutes while on duty. People are concerned that he may be a rapist[have sex with me so I won't arrest you is also rape, dudes]

I get the feeling this article might be classist.

CA talks about crime. In comments we get a bunch of stereotypes and failed policies.

In other news, it seems that social work programs have been cut.

We probably will never be able to move forward, I think. Note this article. Apparently, the whole problem with Memphis AND Detriot is not anything crazy like economic issues, infrastructure or education. It's black mayors not being nice enough to white folks. I guess that's convenient for all of us. We don't have to do anything if that's the problem. We'll elect a new mayor, and if he's not all we desire, it'll be his problem.

That reminds me- a man from Chicago was talking about reducing violence against children in the school system.

But in many neighborhood high schools, adults add to a culture of aggression. Security guards holler, teachers curse. Kids get physical and adults do to.

A year ago this week I was at Robeson High School reporting another story. Robeson is now one of the 38 schools targeted for a culture makeover.

It was October 16, about 3 PM, sunny…Students were leaving school. I was driving out of the parking lot when I saw one of Robeson’s assigned police officers grab a boy and slam him against a police car.

The officer raised his arm and hammered the side of the boy’s head, smashing it into the car. Another officer held the boy, even though he wasn’t putting up a fight. The first officer punched him in the face again.

I stopped my car and scrambled to turn on my tape recorder…This is all I got—the police sending away the crowd of kids who'd gathered.

POLICE: Get the f*** away now! Get this motherf***** in the back of your car! I headed for a group of kids who saw the beating.
UTTON: Did you see it?

GIRL: Yes I did. OK. The little boy was walking he looked like he was on his way home. The police just ran up on him, grabbed him from behind, boom boom boom—started punching him all in his face

GIRL2: And then the other police officer… In the past four years, CPS says there have been more than 400 cases of district employees physically abusing students. That includes everything from coaches paddling athletes to kids being hit with staplers. Huberman says he wants to re-train security guards as part of his culture of calm—he’s even suggested a security guard academy.


That sort of chaos where the adults are useless or may even be contributing to the violence... I don't think children can learn much in that environment. Instead of us believing our children[the children of the city are the children of all the city, I say] are always chaotic evil maybe a more nuanced understanding of the world would help our cities?

Do you live in Hernando? They are looking for two stupid white males who didn't have the sense not to shoot at people on the road.

The reason people react so negatively to scorn on single parents, etc, is that it's not very useful. If scorning women for having kids worked, then we wouldn't be talking about this. It's all talking about the morals of other people's children- unless you're down in the trenches working to make things better, you just seem like some random classist.

In other news, doing girly stuff continues to baffle me.

Do new fads for childcare cause women an undue burden? School bus routes are being cut all across the country. Some charge it isn't safe, due to traffic patterns. I especially enjoy the random racist guy in these comments who comes in to complain about integration. Buses to school are important so that the kid can get to school if mom's car breaks down or mom doesn't have a car, or the city bus is extremely unreliable...

I don't get these crazy authoritarian types saying that because dude was drunk, it was OK for him to die in jail. Driving drunk is a very bad idea. But it's not death penalty worthy. It's take a class worthy. Maybe even take your license worthy. But there's no need to kill somebody over it.

Thanks to the Commercial Appeal, I learn of the great evil of not chopping cotton in 90 degree weather for $7.50 an hour. Maybe people's great disgust with OMG, WELFARE! is that it disrupts the whole ideal of a serf class[ideally darker skinned], who can be counted on to chop cotton for $3 a day. Although why they don't like illegal immigrants is a mystery to me. And yea, I'm not going to be doing backbreaking labor for $7.50 an hour. My back hurts as it is.

Crazy anti health care nuts try to disrupt local congress man's town hall.

Are these crazies organized?

Your baby will not explode if you formula feed.

Those darn kids don't get their paychecks again.