I Am A Man: Forum for Black Men
Freedom Theory will be a part of a forum for black men on the campus of Florida A&M University (our alma mater). The forum will feature Dr. Steve Perry (CNN Contributor, Educator), Enitan Bereola (Author of Bereolaesque), Panama Jackson (co-founder of VerySmartBrothas.com) and Wale (hip-hop artist). The forum will have a live broadcast on UStream tomorrow @7 p.m. http://ustre.am/cRjm so tweet in your questions.We are excited about the opportunity to participate in this awesome event; plus we designed an awesome t-shirt that will be distributed to FAMU students that attend. Check it out:
Response to the FT. Hood Shooting by Muslim Army Chaplain Candidate Lt. Lantiqua
A good friend of mine Army Chaplain Candidate Lieutenant Lantiqua, who is a Muslim IMAM (priest), offers creditable words of reflection and a proper explanation of the the Muslim faith in contrast to the actions committed at Ft. Hood by Major Hasan who is also a muslim, but not a devout practicer of the teaching of the Holy Quran. Listen up and let us know what you all think. Interview of Muslim Chaplain Candidate LT. Lantiqua
WTF White and Asian people in blackface in 2009
Jay-z: Hip Hop’s Frankie Sinatra
i recently saw the Jay-z “Empire Sate of Mind” video featuring Alicia Keys and i cant help but think that this is the black version of Fankie Sinatra’s song “New York, New York.”
As i listen to this song, i rejoiced inside as a clunge to the feeling of ownership over our struggle and was proud to see one of our own rise over the gruesome challenges not only in the “concrete jungle” of New York, but in America in general. True he has not overcome every challenge there is, and the ones to come. But the raggedly road of life has many pot holes and dark moments that can wear you out.
in the midst of all this, it is always healthy to stop, reflect, and rejoice over the progress we have made.
Break’s over…get back to work.
WTF Analysis: Gates arrest a signpost on racial road
AP – In this photo taken by a neighbor Thursday July 16, 2009 Henry Louis Gates Jr. center, the director of …
By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP National Writer Jesse Washington, Ap National Writer
It took less than a day for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates to become racial lore. When one of America’s most prominent black intellectuals winds up in handcuffs, it’s not just another episode of profiling — it’s a signpost on the nation’s bumpy road to equality.
The news was parsed and Tweeted, rued and debated. This was, after all Henry “Skip” Gates: Summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale. MacArthur “genius grant” recipient. Acclaimed historian, Harvard professor and PBS documentarian. One of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997. Holder of 50 honorary degrees.
If this man can be taken away by police officers from the porch of his own home, what does it say about the treatment that average blacks can expect in 2009?
Earl Graves Jr., CEO of the company that publishes Black Enterprise magazine, was once stopped by police during his train commute to work, dressed in a suit and tie.
“My case took place back in 1995, and here we are 14 years later dealing with the same madness,” he said Tuesday. “Barack Obama being the president has meant absolutely nothing to white law enforcement officers. Zero. So I have zero confidence that (Gates’ case) will lead to any change whatsoever.”
The 58-year-old professor had returned from a trip to China last Thursday afternoon and found the front door of his Cambridge, Mass., home stuck shut. Gates entered the back door, forced open the front door with help from a car service driver, and was on the phone with the Harvard leasing company when a white police sergeant arrived.
Gates and the sergeant gave differing accounts of what happened next. But for many people, that doesn’t matter.
They don’t care that Gates was charged not with breaking and entering, but with disorderly conduct after repeatedly demanding the sergeant’s name and badge number. It doesn’t matter whether Gates was yelling, or accused Sgt. James Crowley of being racist, or that all charges were dropped Tuesday.
All they see is pure, naked racial profiling.
“Under any account … all of it is totally uncalled for,” said Graves.
“It never would have happened — imagine a white professor, a distinguished white professor at Harvard, walking around with a cane, going into his own house, being harassed or stopped by the police. It would never happen.”
Racial profiling became a national issue in the 1990s, when highway police on major drug delivery routes were accused of stopping drivers simply for being black. Lawsuits were filed, studies were commissioned, data was analyzed. “It is wrong, and we will end it in America,” President George W. Bush said in 2001.
Yet for every study that concluded police disproportionately stop, search and arrest minorities, another expert came to a different conclusion. “That’s always going to be the case,” Greg Ridgeway, who has a Ph.D in statistics and studies racial profiling for the RAND research group, said on Monday. “You’re never going to be able to (statistically) prove racial profiling. … There’s always a plausible explanation.”
Federal legislation to ban racial profiling has languished since being introduced in 2007 by a dozen Democratic senators, including then-Sen. Barack Obama.
U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., said that was partly because “when you look at statistics, and you’re trying to prove the extent, the information comes back that there’s not nearly as much (profiling) as we continue to experience.”
But Davis has no doubt that profiling is real: He says he was stopped while driving in Chicago in 2007 for no reason other than the fact he is black. Police gave him a ticket for swerving over the center line; a judge said the ticket didn’t make sense and dismissed it.
“Trying to reach this balance of equity, equal treatment, equal protection under the law, equal understanding, equal opportunity, is something that we will always be confronted with. We may as well be prepared for it,” he said.
Amid the indignation over Gates’ case, a few people pointed out that he may have violated the cardinal rule of avoiding arrest: Do not antagonize the cops.
The police report said that Gates yelled at the officer, refused to calm down and behaved in a “tumultuous” manner. Gates said he simply asked for the officer’s identification, followed him into his porch when the information was not forthcoming, and was arrested for no reason. But something about being asked to prove that you live in your own home clearly struck a nerve — both for Gates and his defenders.
“You feel violated, embarrassed, not sure what is taking place, especially when you haven’t done anything,” said Graves of his own experience, when police made him face the wall and frisked him in Grand Central Station in New York City. “You feel shocked, then you realize what’s happening, and then you feel it’s a violation of everything you stand for.”
And that this should happen to “Skip” Gates — the unblemished embodiment of President Obama’s recent admonition to black America not to search for handouts or favors, but to “seize our own future, each and every day” — shook many people to the core.
Wrote Lawrence Bobo, Gates’ Harvard colleague, who picked his friend up from jail: “Ain’t nothing post-racial about the United States of America.”
___
Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press.
Oldest known Bible goes online
By Richard Allen Greene
CNN
LONDON, England (CNN) — The world’s oldest known Christian Bible goes online Monday — but the 1,600-year-old text doesn’t match the one you’ll find in churches today.
The British government bought most of the pages of the ancient manuscript in 1933.
Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.
The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections — some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.
And some familiar — very important — passages are missing, including verses dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, they said.
Juan Garces, the British Library project curator, said it should be no surprise that the ancient text is not quite the same as the modern one, since the Bible has developed and changed over the years.
“The Bible as an inspirational text has a history,” he told CNN.
“There are certainly theological questions linked to this,” he said. “Everybody should be encouraged to investigate for themselves.”
That is part of the reason for putting the Bible online, said Garces, who is both a Biblical scholar and a computer scientist.
“Scholars will want to look very closely at it, and some of the Web site functionality is specifically for them — the ability to search the text, the ability to highlight a word, the degree of detail is particularly interesting for scholars interested in the text,” he said.
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Codex Sinaiticus project
But, he added, “It’s for everyone, really a wide audience, because of curiosity, because they appreciate the value of it.”
By the middle of the fourth century, when the Codex Sinaiticus was written, there was wide but not complete agreement on which books should be considered authoritative for Christian communities, according to the Web site where the Codex is posted.
The Bible comes from the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert, where a scholar named Constantine Tischendorf recognized its significance in 1844 — and promptly took part of it, Garces explained.
“Constantine Tischendorf was in search for ancient manuscripts, so he appreciated the age and value of it,” Garces said.
He took a handful of pages to Germany to publish them, then returned in 1853 and in 1859 for more. On that last trip, he took 694 pages, which ended up in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The Soviet government decided to sell them in 1933 — to raise money to buy tractors and other agricultural equipment.
The British government bought the pages for £100,000, raising half the money from the public. Garces called that event one of the first fundraising campaigns in British history.
Film footage from the time shows crowds of people turning out to see the manuscript, which was considered a national treasure, he said.
Though the Bible has been reassembled online, in the real world it remains scattered.
Most of it is in London. Eighty-six pages are held at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany, parts of 12 pages are held at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, and 24 pages and 40 fragments remain at St. Catherine’s Monastery, recovered by the monks from the northern wall of the structure in June 1975.
The manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. (A copy held at the Vatican dates from about the same period.) Older copies of individual portions of the Christian Bible exist, but not as part of a complete text.
The Codex also includes much of the Old Testament that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians.
That portion includes books not found in the Hebrew Bible and regarded in the Protestant tradition as apocryphal, such as 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach.
The New Testament portion includes the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas.
As it survives today, Codex Sinaiticus comprises just over 400 large leaves of parchment — prepared animal skin — each of which measures 15 inches by 13.6 inches (380 mm by 345 mm). E-mail to a friend
The Conscious Alternative to Urban Wear
Johnathon Sellers, Founder and Creative Director gives a brief history of Freedom Theory and how it will impact society.
Freedom Theory asks, “What is Your Pursuit?”
“What is Your Pursuit?”
The theme for the 3rd State of the Black Student Summit (www.thesbss.com) was The Pursuit: How Obama and Hip-Hop Can Renew the American Promise. Kianta C. Key, chairman of the summit, said The Summit was designed to encourage students that if young African-Americans can wield their influence in the 2008 presidential election, there should be little reason why the same demographic cannot exert such power in other areas.
“We felt if we can get a black man in the White House, they why can’t we get better schools or start small businesses through (inspiration from) hip-hop?” Key asked.
Freedom Theory asked several of the panelists, “What is Your Pursuit?”
Music by DJ Jamad from an array of Afromental Collections
Freedom Theory Presents: What Frees You?
So what frees you? Well for Montrel Miller, a graduate from Florida A&M University, acting is way to break free. He resides now in Atlanta pursuing a career as an actor. Check him out in this P. Diddy skit. P.S. Montrel is P. Diddy.
Feel free to Contact Montrel at montrelmiller@gmail.com
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