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“Leaders of the Tohono O’odham nation say the fence, currently being built along the U.S.-Mexican border by the Department of Homeland Security, will prevent members of their nation from crossing into Mexico for traditional religious ceremonies.”
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Nooooooooooo! - LDP
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“Strict conditions on international loans have been blamed for thousands of extra tuberculosis deaths in eastern Europe, and former Soviet republics.”
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“Senegal’s standing has improved to the point where it took three of the four titles on offer at last year’s world championships in Canada - not bad for a country with a 40% literacy rate.”
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“[Nas is] putting actions behind his words through teaming with Color of Change to send a powerful message to Fox that we won’t stand for race hatred on the airwaves.”
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“For the first time, I saw that the abbaya may have a role in protecting women, and not as something simply designed to control them.”
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
gatamala wrote:
*pours out prune-tini*
RIP Sophia, I guess she’s in the lanai (sp?) in the sky.
I was a 9 year black girl who watched that show religiously. That episode where Dorothy caught her in bed with Murray…
Posted 23 Jul 2008 at 7:54 am ¶
red wrote:
“Senegal’s standing has improved to the point where it took three of the four titles on offer at last year’s world championships in Canada - not bad for a country with a 40% literacy rate.”
- not surprising for a country with fantastic hip hop.
(and that’s not to mention the griot tradition…)
Go to Senegal for top wordsmiths, I reckon.
Posted 23 Jul 2008 at 11:34 am ¶
James wrote:
Another possibly worthy endeavor (though I doubt it) undercut by the ‘two-steps-back’ foolishness of Nas. I’m sorry, but a guy who tried to name his album ‘the N-word’ (this isn’t my blog, so I won’t use the term) can’t logically protest other entertainers when they antagonize African Americans through racist innuendo, even when they perform on FOX News.
FOX News demonizes people of color to advertise products to their perversion of Middle America, but if folk feel it necessary to attack cable channels for their racism, why aren’t BET and VH-1 at the top of the list?
Oh right - because they promote Nas’ anti-minority, faux-revolutionary albums.
Look, the problem isn’t FOX News propaganda, it’s a 24-hour cable news cycle that daily replaces fact with fiction and complexity with simplicity.
A serious discussion on the significance of Barack and Michelle Obama wouldn’t include so tawdry a phrase as ‘terrorist fist jab’ but it may include examinations of the professional African American electorate, the evolution of Black political thought to include both mixed race and feminist voices openly, and/or the success of 20th Century liberalism in forging educational and business opportunities to those denied an ability to compete for so long under our system through affirmative action.
But FOX News isn’t alone in shirking from those discussions. MSNBC and BET won’t cover that either. We’ll see if Soledad O’Brian can change CNN’s track record tonight.
Posted 23 Jul 2008 at 12:00 pm ¶
Matt wrote:
I only now find out, but it makes perfect sense that Estelle Getty came out of New York Yiddish theater and Borscht Belt comedy. Her character was Italian, though. (Bea Arthur’s as well, though Arthur is also Jewish.) That’s been a common pattern, I think - assimilating Jews on TV by turning them into Italians.
Posted 23 Jul 2008 at 1:01 pm ¶
coco wrote:
re: Senegalese Scrabble champions
I love that 14 words from the Senegalese Wolof dialect have entered the official Scrabble dictionary for French players.
Making elite French scrabble players learn even just 14 Wolof words contributes to the vitality of the Wolof language, and is a good example of how colonial cultural boundaries can be pushed in both directions. (In this case, it operates for the greater enrichment of Scrabble culture.)
Posted 23 Jul 2008 at 1:56 pm ¶
jvansteppes wrote:
Yes, the talk of prune tinis can only serve to remind us how much more progressive the Golden Girls were next to Sex and the City [Rue Mclanahan has also commented on this]. Remember when they got a black cleaning lady and she took them down a notch for thinking she had voodoo powers?
Matt- now that you mention it, I seem to remember Bea Arthur’s character in Maude as being Italian as well, or at least intentionally non-Jewish. I’m sure she’d have a lot to say on the history of passing on tv and in film…
Posted 23 Jul 2008 at 5:43 pm ¶
Donna wrote:
[Mod Note - Your comment has been deleted.
1. Did you even read the piece?
and
2. We have no tolerance for Islamophobia.
-LDP ]
Posted 27 Jul 2008 at 10:25 am ¶