tagged w/ African-American
-
In a surprise move, Academy Award-winner Jennifer Hudson was called as the prosecution’s first witness in the Hudson family murder trial in Chicago. The award-winning singer and actress broke down and cried on the witness stand Monday as she recalled the brutal 2008 murders of her mother, brother and young nephew, allegedly at the hands of her jealous brother-in-law, William Balfour. “It was always me and my Tugga Bear,” she told jurors of her beloved 7-year-old nephew Julian King.
Balfour is accused of killing Jennifer Hudson’s mother, brother and 7-year-old nephew in the Southside Chicago home where the Hollywood star grew up. Balfour allegedly killed Hudson’s mother, Darnell Donerson, in the living room, then shot her 29-year-old brother, Jason Hudson, twice in the head as he lay in bed. He then drove off with her sister’s son, Julian King, and later shot the boy, nicknamed “Juice Box,” in the head as he lay behind a front seat, authorities say.
It is anticipated that Jennifer Hudson will attend the entire trial. She was accompanied to court today by her fiancé, the professional wrestler David Otunga. Following her 30-minute testimony, she joined him in the fourth row of the courtroom.
This piece includes photographs and two news videos.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/hudson-family-murder-trial-begins-jennifer-hudson-breaks-down-on-the-stand/In a surprise move, Academy Award-winner Jennifer Hudson was called as the... more
-
-
Camilo José Vergara has spent more than thirty years documenting poor, urban and minority neighborhoods across the United States. His projects emerge from a large archive of images he has made since 1977 of the nation’s largest ghettos. His exhaustive research has taken him to Camden and Newark, New Jersey; Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; Maine; New York; and Los Angeles. Vergara takes his camera to places plagued by the drug trade, and to neighborhoods filled with homeless shelters, prisons, and drug treatment facilities. He is a prolific photographer who continues to live in New York City. Vergara has been the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.
Vergara describes his approach as interdisciplinary, using techniques from fields that include sociology, architecture, photography, urban planning, history and anthropology. He has focused upon the gradual erosion of urban neighborhoods by photographing the same structures repeatedly over decades in order to capture the process of of urban decay. The photography presented here is from Vergara’s project entitled “Invincible Cities.” He returned to the same intersection in Harlem and photographed the changes in one building for 38 years. The images create a composite, time-lapse portrait of one of New York City’s most vibrant and distinctive areas.
This piece includes a number of color photographs, a photo-gallery and a documentary short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/invincible-cities-harlems-painted-lady-on-east-125th-street/Camilo José Vergara has spent more than thirty years documenting poor, urban... more
-
-
Idaho's only black lawmaker said she received a direct mailing from the Ku Klux Klan that has bolstered her resolve to fight prejudice.Idaho's only black lawmaker said she received a direct mailing from the Ku Klux... more
-
-
Last night an eyewitness to the Trayvon Martin killing appeared on CNN and unleashed more damning evidence against the police. Speaking to Ashleigh Banfield, the face-obscured witness said that when the cops brought her in for questioning, she offered to show them the scene of the crime and explain exactly what happened—she saw the "larger man" attacking "the boy"—the police declined her offer. Not only that, but they suggested that she was wrong: that Zimmerman was the one calling for help, not Martin. WOW. Watch below, via Mediaite:Last night an eyewitness to the Trayvon Martin killing appeared on CNN and unleashed... more
-
-
Whiteness is ultimately the freedom to be an individual; blackness is an anchor that stigmatizes by virtue of melanin count, social identity, and connection (real or imagined, tenuous or strong) to a racialized community.Whiteness is ultimately the freedom to be an individual; blackness is an anchor that... more
-
-
"Her death certificate says killed by police, but I feel like my sister was murdered," says Martinez Sutton, whose 22-year-old little sister, Rekia Boyd, was shot in the head by an off-duty Chicago detective on Wednesday, March 21. She died the following day at Mount Sinai Hospital."Her death certificate says killed by police, but I feel like my sister was... more
-
-
Here’s Dan “Darker Means Guiltier” Riehl again at Breitbart.com, with another blatantly race-baiting post: Hoodie-Wearing Gunmen Kill 1, Wound 5 in Bobby Rush’s Chicago District.
No point in quoting this; I’ll just give you the short version. Blacks, crime, hoodies, blacks, crime, Black Panthers. Also, blacks.Here’s Dan “Darker Means Guiltier” Riehl again at Breitbart.com,... more
-
-
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Next week will mark the third anniversary of Barack Obama's inauguration, and the unveiling of his fourth budget. Already White House spokespeople admit that it will be bad news for black and poor Americans. In three years this president has investigated and prosecuted not a single Wall Street banker or institution, not held up the wave of foreclosures a single week, not addressed the issues of black unemployment or black mass incarceration. But black America has silenced itself to protect the career of the First Black President.
Three years later, it's clear that this is indeed a new day, a new era. But for most of black America, it's not the one they hoped for. Nobody expected urban poverty would begin to vanish overnight, or that millions of acres of lost black farmland would be restored. But promises were made, and expectations were justifiably high, not because Barack Obama had promised to investigate Wall Street, prosecute banksters, or stop the imperial wars and illegal foreclosures, but because humans do have the right to expect justice at home and peace abroad, whether their leaders deliver these things or not.by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Next week will mark the third anniversary of... more
-
-
It's fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, now that according to some mainstream polls he has become the front-running candidate in the Jan. 3 GOP caucus race in Iowa, and perhaps also in the first primary campaign in New Hampshire.
What's interesting is what he's being attacked for: being a racist, being "anti-Israel" and being an isolationist.
The racist bit is funny. After all, if we're honest, the whole political infrastructure of the US is riven with racism. Just check out the public schools in any urban area, where you'll find most of the students are non-white, or check out the schools in rural parts of the southeast in areas where most of the students are black -- compare the condition of those schools and the class sizes to schools in the white neighborhoods. Check out the wildly different jobless figures for whites and for blacks. Check out the (very pale) complexion of the student bodies at just about any state university, check out the skin tones of the judges on the US Supreme Court, or for that matter, the whole federal bench. Check out the racial breakdown of the nation's jails, and especially on the country's many death rows, where you'll find a wildly outsized percentage of people with black or brown skin waiting to be killed by the state.
Being a racist is clearly no disqualifier for national political office. It's just that you are not supposed to say overtly racist things, at least in public. It's fine to pass laws and push for enforcement actions and "tough" judges that end up putting most young African-American males in prison at some point in their lives. It's okay to promote a "War" on drugs that ends up creating a whole new slavery in the form of black men locked up in for-profit prisons. It's okay to shortchange minority school districts. You just aren't supposed to say you're doing these things on purpose...It's fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep.... more
-
-
“Losers” is a new, emotionally touching two-minute short film by Everynone, with brilliant sound design and an ethereal score by Keith Kenniff. “Losers” is an anti-bullying film that not only effectively conveys its message, but is visually stimulating as well. The film brings you face to face with how racial slurs, anti-gay taunts, and other insults and actions can hurt others.
This piece includes photographs and the short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/losers-walking-through-a-world-of-insults/“Losers” is a new, emotionally touching two-minute short film by... more
-
-
Seven weeks after Bachmann's campaign announcement, an African-American teenager was beaten to death. Marcellus Richard Andrews was gay and it cost him his life in Michele Bachmann’s hometown.Seven weeks after Bachmann's campaign announcement, an African-American teenager... more
-
-
Cabal
-
added this
-
9 months ago
- |
-
As members of Congress roll out a host of anti-abortion legislation, African Americans on both sides of the debate say it's time to look beyond the old concepts of pro-choice and pro-life.
Looking Beyond Life and Choice
Pro-lifers are hoping that African Americans will take up their side of the battle. According to a 2009 Pew Research Center survey (pdf), 40 percent of African Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. From former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum expressing amazement in January that a black man (President Barack Obama) could ever be pro-choice, to billboard campaigns that liken abortion to black genocide, African Americans are now positioned at the center of the rekindled debate.
"What baffles me is how many political progressives will look at every institution in America and say there's racism in it, but somehow when it comes to the abortion industry, racism doesn't exist," Bomberger told The Root, "even though the entire history is predicated on the horrific pseudoscience that believes only certain people are fit to live."
Bomberger is further frustrated by the pro-life movement being portrayed as consisting entirely of the white religious right. "The annual March for Life in D.C. is the most multiracial coalition that I have ever seen, with hundreds of thousands of Hispanic, black, white and Asian people. Of course, it's also the most ignored," he said. "The whole argument that white conservative people don't care about black people is so tired. What is worse: white conservative people who want to save black lives, or white liberal people who want to fund the killing of black lives?"
African Americans on the other side of the debate, meanwhile, remain unconvinced that, for example, conservative members of Congress pushing to restrict abortion have black interests in mind. "They say they're concerned about the black race but then don't support black children once they're here," says Loretta Ross, national coordinator of SisterSong, an Atlanta-based reproductive-justice group for women of color, who argues that the same conservative lawmakers ignore economic and educational inequalities.
"In our own collective history, black women know what it feels like when someone else controls our bodies and makes decisions for us," Ross continued in an interview with The Root. "We're fighting fiercely for our rights to be seen as adult human beings capable of making decisions for ourselves about these things. We know what happens when you become breeders for somebody else's cause. Even as strong as our religious feelings are, we don't play that."
Gaining Steam on Capitol Hill
Regardless of the debate among African Americans, members of Congress -- and not just Republicans -- are forging ahead with efforts to restrict funding and access for abortion. Ten House Democrats are among the 173 co-sponsors of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, striking a blow to the claim that abortion bills have no chance of passing the Democratic-held Senate.
http://www.theroot.com/views/beyond-same-old-abortion-debate?page=0,0As members of Congress roll out a host of anti-abortion legislation, African Americans... more
-
-
bambuu
-
added this
-
1 year ago
- |
-
In 1998, the small East Texas town of Jasper was shaken by the brutal, racially motivated killing of a forty-nine-year old African American named James Byrd Jr. The international coverage of that traumatic race-crime did not, for the most part, reveal the stark past and complicated social life of this historically segregated community. For example, little notice was paid to the photographs of Alonzo Jordan (1903-1984), a local photographer who had made Byrd’s high school graduation portrait, and who had worked for more than forty years to document African Americans in Jasper and in the surrounding rural areas. Jordan’s photographs are the subject of an exhibition, “Jasper, Texas: The Community Photographs of Alonzo Jordan,” presently on view at The International Center of Photography in New York City.
Like many small-town photographers, Alonzo Jordan fulfilled various roles in the community. A barber by trade, Alonzo Jordan was also a Prince Hall Mason, a deacon in his church, an educator and a local leader, who took up photography to fill a social need he recognized. Over the years, he documented the everyday world of black East Texas, especially the civic events and social rituals that were integral to the daily life of the people he served. In addition to revealing the African American culture of Jasper during the Civil Rights era, this exhibition challenges the existing formalistic approaches to the study of vernacular photography. It considers Jordan’s distinguished career as a “community photographer.”
In communities across the nation, photographs of this kind have been proudly displayed for decades in people’s homes, local churches, businesses, civic buildings and schools, because they document groups and individuals who are held in high esteem. Frequently, the photographer is not identified or credited, because the emphasis is upon the family, social and professional groups, and the recognition of the community infrastructure.
This piece includes a number of high-resolution black-and-white vintage photographs, a slide show and a documentary short film about the life of James Byrd Jr.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/jasper-texas-the-hidden-half-of-a-small-texas-town/In 1998, the small East Texas town of Jasper was shaken by the brutal, racially... more
-
-
-
's who are honest with themselves have to admit that there are things in their past, that don't make them look too good, at the end of the day.'s who are honest with themselves have to admit that there are things in their... more
-
-
many of us know people who just can't seem to say no? I mean even when it's obvious to the world "that NO would have been the best answer." Some of us have family members like thismany of us know people who just can't seem to say no? I mean even when it's... more
-
-
by Getty Images via @daylife/ In your opinion, who is a joke in the eyes of Jesus?
-
-
(Love songs for the heart).
-
-
My latest NYJB review is of an epic work of poetry and great humanity that may appeal to history buffs as well as poetry readers.My latest NYJB review is of an epic work of poetry and great humanity that may appeal... more
-
-
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) was one of the most visible advocates of nonviolence and direct action as methods of social change. Dr. King initially gained national prominence for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott campaign, as well as in the Birmingham demonstrations that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964; the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to Dr. King by President Jimmy Carter in 1964.
In late 1967, King initiated the Poor People’s Campaign, which was designed to confront economic problems that had not been addressed by earlier civil rights reforms. The following year, while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, he delivered his final address, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” The following day, April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated.
This commemorative piece includes a number of high-resolution vintage photographs, as well as two memorable documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/a-tribute-to-dr-martin-luther-king-and-the-civil-rights-movement/Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) was one of the most visible advocates of... more
-
