In the spirit of India.Arie's latest album and her hit single, "I Am Not My Hair," I just wanted to take a moment to school you on the history and spirituality of my chosen hairstyle: locs.
Locs themselves have been around for a long time and there are people of many cultures and religions that wear locs. Not getting too deep here, I will focus on the overwhelming influence from Jamaica as a historical starting point. Read More »
By ERIN TEXEIRA Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Keith Borders tries hard not to scare people. He's 6-foot-7 (about 2 meters), a garrulous lawyer who talks with his hands. And he's black. Many people find him threatening. He works hard to prove otherwise. Read More »
I was bombarded with emails last night of people asking me what I meant when I said "Happy 4th of you-lie" in my last blog. For those of you who don't know what that's all about I advise you to check out Frederick Douglas' speech, The Fourth of July for the Negro (http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/cgi-bin/forum/archive1/config.pl?read=41505). Too many mainstream historians have decried the tendency to point out hypocrisy in American history, to find every holiday and cause for celebration tainted. Read More »
Personally, I don't choose to celebrate Independence Day because none of my people achieved independence on this day.
Instead, we celebrate Juneteenth. Juneteenth is the oldest nationallly celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.
From its Galveston, TX origin in 1865, the observance of June 19th as the African American Emancipation Day has spread across the United States and beyond. Read More »
Nina Simone's song, "Four Women", introduces four Black women. There is Aunt Sara, the slave; Sefronia, the mulatto; Sweet Thang, the jezebel; and Peaches, the angry militant. This song came into my life at a time when I was beginning to articulate how my Blackness and female-ness shaped my thoughts and dreams. In middle school I wrote and performed a one-girl piece called "The Slave Secret" for a History Fair competition and my 7th grade drama class. As I left the class, I overheard someone say, "She's really angry!" I was shocked and hurt that my work and my person - with all of my complexity - had been summed up in one word, ANGRY, especially when so many different feelings and thoughts had been expressed in the piece. This shock, however, was fleeting. I would be called angry so often in the years to come that I may as well have worn a nametag. So, I began to think of myself as a "Peaches," and to notice other girls and women who could be called "Peaches" too. Read More »
Getting teens to think about their actions and futures is something 4Positive Knowledge founder, Terry Boykins, knows a few things about. Or, quite possibly a few hundred things.
Since 1998, Boykins, a Southern California entrepreneur, has been challenging middle and high school students to take him up on his cash incentives, provided that they do the one thing required to qualify. Present and defend their plan for success in front of their peers. Read More »
For those of you who don't know, the age of consent refers to the age at which a person’s consent to have sex is recognised as valid in the eyes of the law. Men (and sometimes women, depending upon local law) who engage in sexual activity with young men or women below this age are therefore guilty of a criminal offence. This is true even if it was the young person who wanted to have sex and ‘fully consented’ to it – the agreement of the person below the age of consent is simply invalid in the eyes of the law. Yet in many countries this offense (statutory rape) is one that is very severely punished, sometimes with a sentence of up to life imprisonment. It is the combination of these factors that make age of consent laws highly controversial. Read More »
The sight of people being deprived of parts of their lives that we take for granted is one of the most unsettling that can reach us. The cases that have appeared the most urgent are those that command the headlines — Saddam’s treatment of Kurds, Milosovic’s treatment of Kosovar Albanians — and they are the cases that command the most drastic action from the West. But less prominent infringements of human rights can be as serious: “prisoners of conscience” are held world-wide. Is there any moral difference between the urgent and the ongoing, and how should they be tackled? Intervention, whether by all-out military force, through peace-keeping forces, or by diplomatic means, can arguably curtail human rights abuses, but it does pose practical and moral problems. What country has the right to intervene? How can civilian casualties be curbed? The problem leads towards a cold cost–benefit analysis, but any debate on this subject is likely to revolve just as much around emotive arguments. Read More »
