Wayne Law to host symposium on race relations March 22

Gosh I wish I could go to this but somehow SOME WAY, I will find another way to soak up this knowledge.

http://law.wayne.edu/alumni/news.php?id=11166

"The basic thing I want you to see is that while this period (the protest phase of the civil rights movement) represented a frontal attack on the doctrine and practice of white supremacy, it did not defeat the monster of racism....The roots of racism are very deep in this country."

~Martin Luther King Jr.


http://www.doi.gov/pmb/eeo/AA-HM.cfm

Message to Gangs - Rochester, NY

http://www.whec.com/whecimages/repository/cs/files/sheppard-letter_031813.pdf

Kenneth B. Clark

The works of Kenneth B. Clark

Prejudice and Your Child (1955)
King, Malcolm, Baldwin: Three Interviews (1963)
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1965)
Social and Economic Implications of Integration in Public Schools (1965)
The Negro American (1966, with Talcott Parsons)
A Relevant War Against Poverty (1969)
Crisis in Urban Education (1971)
A Possible Reality (1972)
Pathos of Power (1975)

They have no inner-determined direction. Whoever develops any movement toward power in the ghetto finally does so through winning the allegiance of this group-the largest in the ghetto-not of the semicriminal and certainly not of the elite and comfortable" (Clark 14).

Compensatory grandiose behavior

(Clark, Dark Ghetto, 11).

Their inexperience and political unsophistication have a fundamental root-the psychology of the ghetto with its pervasive and total sense of helplessness. It is difficult, if not impossible, to behave as one with power when all one's experience has indicated that one has none. (156)

Is It Time to Move Past Urban Studies and Toward Urbanization Science?

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2013/03/it-time-move-past-urban-studies-and-toward-urbanization-science/5022/

It’s Time for an Urbanization Science

http://ugec.org/docs/UrbanizationScience%202013.pdf

There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America

a 1991 biography by Alex Kotlowitz that describes the experiences of two brothers growing up in Chicago's Henry Horner Homes

The 7 Most Infamous U.S. Public Housing Projects

http://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/

Poverty and place : ghettos, barrios, and the American city / Paul A. Jargowsky

Streets as Places

I wish I could go to this.

"Vital cities are not helpless to combat even the most difficult problems.” -Jane Jacobs

Placemaking is not a new idea

The concepts behind Placemaking originated in the 1960s, when visionaries like Jane Jacobs and William “Holly” Whyte offered groundbreaking ideas about designing cities that catered to people, not just to cars and shopping centers. Their work focused on the importance of lively neighborhoods and inviting public spaces. Jane Jacobs advocated citizen ownership of streets through the now-famous idea of “eyes on the street.” Holly Whyte emphasized essential elements for creating social life in public spaces.

Place-making

http://www.pps.org/reference/what_is_placemaking/

The Need for More Supermarkets in New York

Special Report

Key Findings
Access to food is not evenly distributed in New York. Many people have to travel excessive
distances to buy food at a supermarket.

The uneven distribution of food in New York disproportionately affects large numbers
of low-income people.

There is a connection between diabetes and lack of supermarket access.



Weekly Sales Volume for Supermarkets

Healthy Food Access Portal

Welcome to the nation’s first comprehensive healthy food access retail portal.

http://www.healthyfoodaccess.org/

Unemployment rates by state and race, 2012Q4

http://www.epi.org/chart/unemployment-rates-state-race-2012q4/?view=embed-unemployment-map-2012q4

New York's Green Roofs Are Crawling With Fungi

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/03/new-yorks-green-roofs-are-crawling-fungus/4960/

Rich Benjamin: The Future of White America

Racial Profiling

http://www.upworthy.com/meet-the-17-year-old-who-blew-the-lid-off-racial-profiling-with-his-ipod?g=3

Photography of the ghetto / urban decay / Detroit

Photos based on Flickr

The Ghetto
http://www.flickr.com/groups/theghetto/

Urban Detroit
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tooloose-letrek/sets/813247/with/8534197890/

Urban Decay
http://www.flickr.com/groups/decay/pool/with/8534197890/#photo_8534197890

The Living City

http://www.flickr.com/groups/thelivingcity/pool/with/8534197890/#photo_8534197890

My other blog

Graffiti is one of my interests / overlaps with some of my research interests so check out my graffiti / street art blog :

http://jaybejaybe.blogspot.com/

Library To Sell Forest City-Adjacent Branches

Brooklyn library lost to developers


http://observer.com/2013/02/a-ratner-in-the-stacks/

BPP

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton

* Book Wish List *

to check out

The New Jim Crow
-Michelle Alexander

Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now
Touré (Author)

Interview Highlights

On the number of blacks in the criminal justice system

"Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men are either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives."

On the war on drugs — and federal incentives given out through the war on drugs — as the primary causes of the prison explosion in the United States

"Federal funding has flowed to state and local law enforcement agencies who boost the sheer numbers of drug arrests. State and local law enforcement agencies have been rewarded in cash for the sheer numbers of people swept into the system for drug offenses, thus giving law enforcement agencies an incentive to go out and look for the so-called 'low-hanging fruit': stopping, frisking, searching as many people as possible, pulling over as many cars as possible, in order to boost their numbers up and ensure the funding stream will continue or increase."

Under Jim Crow laws, black Americans were relegated to a subordinate status for decades. Things like literacy tests for voters and laws designed to prevent blacks from serving on juries were commonplace in nearly a dozen Southern states.

In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs. She says that although Jim Crow laws are now off the books, millions of blacks arrested for minor crimes remain marginalized and disfranchised, trapped by a criminal justice system that has forever branded them as felons and denied them basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens.

"People are swept into the criminal justice system — particularly in poor communities of color — at very early ages ... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes," she tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "[The young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they're released, they're relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement — like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, and access to education and public benefits. Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon."

On Monday's Fresh Air, Alexander details how President Reagan's war on drugs led to a mass incarceration of black males and the difficulties these felons face after serving their prison sentences. She also details her own experiences working as the director of the Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Greening of Detroit

http://greeningofdetroit.com/

Immigrants have a better chance of being hired than anyone else for fast food jobs in Harlem, especially recent immigrants (Newman 242-43).

Why they are preferred: Higher energy levels, willing to do anything, work for nothing (244-45).

Previous experience not as crucial for immigrants as for native-born- preference for immigrants (246)

25% native-born had found a job, 40% of foreign-born (247)

How the NY Times Went Too Far in Slamming Big Organic

The organic label, for all the untoward influence of Big Food players like dairy giant Dean Foods, still means something. If you buy food labeled organic, you can be reasonably sure it was grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, without genetically modified seeds, without (in the case of dairy, meat, and eggs) antibiotics and other dodgy pharmaceuticals, and on farms required to have a plan for crop rotation and (quoting straight from federal organic code) to "manage plant and animal materials to maintain or improve soil organic matter content."

In other words, despite 20 years of effort by Big Food to make organic friendly to GMOs, monocrops, dodgy fertilizers like sewage sludge, and more, the organic label remains the single most accessible way for consumers to avoid supporting the worst ecological practices of industrial agriculture.

And as Strom's article demonstrates amply, corporate giants have indeed big-footed their way into organic, lured in by two things that have been missing for years in the conventional food industry: robust annual sales growth and the ability to charge higher prices.

The American Dream

What is the American Dream?
James Truslow Adams, in his book The Epic of America, which was written in 1931, stated that the American dream is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." (p.214-215)

The authors of the United States’ Declaration of Independence held certain truths to be self-evident: that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Might this sentiment be considered the foundation of the American Dream?

Were homesteaders who left the big cities of the east to find happiness and their piece of land in the unknown wilderness pursuing these inalienable Rights? Were the immigrants who came to the United States looking for their bit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their Dream? And what did the desire of the veteran of World War II - to settle down, to have a home, a car and a family - tell us about this evolving Dream? Is the American Dream attainable by all Americans?

Some say, that the American Dream has become the pursuit of material prosperity - that people work more hours to get bigger cars, fancier homes, the fruits of prosperity for their families - but have less time to enjoy their prosperity. Others say that the American Dream is beyond the grasp of the working poor who must work two jobs to insure their family’s survival. Yet others look toward a new American Dream with less focus on financial gain and more emphasis on living a simple, fulfilling life.

Thomas Wolfe said, "…to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity ….the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him."

Is this your American Dream?

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/lessons/american-dream/students/thedream.html

Promoting Equity through the Practice of Health Impact Assessment

Only 8 percent of African Americans live in a census tract with a supermarket, compared to 31 percent of whites.

In 30 years, people of color will constitute a majority of the U.S. population.


http://www.policylink.org/atf/cf/%7B97c6d565-bb43-406d-a6d5-eca3bbf35af0%7D/PROMOTINGEQUITYHIA_FINAL.PDF

The Decline of Communities Could Explain America's Health Problems

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/how-decline-communities-explains-americas-health-problems/4889/

Michigan Will Take Over Detroit

According to Governor Snyder, the situation is now beyond the reach of city politicians. "There is no city that is more financially challenged in the entire United States," Snyder said.

Detroit will be the largest city in the country to lose the ability to govern itself.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/michigan-will-take-over-detroit-snyder-has-top-candidate-mind/4843/