Tag Archives: DIY

What to do about Baltimore Schools? l The Real News Netwok l Discussion of crisis in education

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January 2, 2013

What to do about Baltimore Schools?

Pt.2 Lester Spence and Marc Steiner discuss possible fixes to the crisis facing Baltimore public schools

Discussion of Public Schools of Baltimore, MD and the urgency of reinvention.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN  The Real News Network. Paul Jay in Baltimore.

Second part of a discussion about public education in the city. And now joining us again to discuss all of this, first of all, is Lester Spence. He’s a contributor to the book We Are Many. He’s an associate professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins and author of the book Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip Hop and Black Politics.

With Marc Steiner who hosts the widely acclaimed (see? “widely acclaimed”—it actually is) public radio news and interview program The Marc Steiner Show, which you can hear on WEAA 88.9 FM in Baltimore.

Transcript of opening of discussion

LESTER SPENCE, PROF. POLITICAL SCIENCE, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: Thanks for having me.

MARC STEINER, RADIO HOST, WEAA 88.9 FM: It’s good to be here.

JAY: So, Lester, let’s kick it off with you. So let’s say tomorrow you get appointed head of—you’re now in control of education, public education in Baltimore, and you’ve got a majority of support on city council, and the mayor says, Lester, I’ll back you. What would you do?

SPENCE: Well, there are a few things I would do. Right? So one thing I would do is Baltimore City schools are undercapacity—If I’m right, it’s something like 60 percent stands out as far as either 60 percent of them have—people don’t really have a full house, or in general the system is 60 percent undercapacity, which means they have to shut down certain schools. So it becomes a zero-sum competition.

What I would actually do is—if you think about these schools as neighborhood public spaces, one of the first things I would do is I would open them outside the school hours. Right? So a certain amount of time, it would be open for school, but then, after that, whether it’s quote-unquote “training” or whether it’s public meetings, whether it’s gym space for folks to work out in, etc., meeting space, you have to transform these schools to institutions that actually meet the needs of those neighborhoods. Right? So that’s the kind of infrastructure thing I would do.

What I would do as far as curriculum is I would transform the curriculum to build—and I don’t like that word build, but it’s shorthand—to kind of build citizens, like, citizens, you know, to—. If we think about these folks, like, these kids are in school from five to 18, five days a week, you know, nine months out of the year. Imagine what we could—what they could do as citizens if we taught them how to engage in the world politically, right, actually how to be citizens.

And the thing is is there are a number of ways to teach core concepts of math, of science, and literacy through that project, right? Along those same lines, every school would have, like, a community garden, and kids would learn from kindergarten how to grow and tend their own gardens and how to grow and tend their own food and to create a certain type of relationship with the environment.

So just the—if you just think about just those two things, if I only could do two things, right, the one is you make those schools public institutions and make them open them up to the community, like, year-round, 24/7, and then the second thing is reframe the curriculum and gear the curriculum towards making them citizens, like, local global citizens.

JAY: I guess you could add to that community center cheap, affordable daycare.

Watch full multipart The Real Baltimore

Wicked African Leaders Are Selling-Off Africa

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Wicked African Leaders Are Selling-Off Africa

Source: Modern Ghana

Updated January 3, 2013 at 5:11 am GMT |

Killing our own African brothers and sisters for political power

Killing our own African brothers and sisters for political power

By Naiwu Osahon

A new form of neo-colonialism has since surfaced in Africa. It is land grabbing by foreign companies and governments. It is probably not new. Arabs began grabbing Northern Africa and eliminating the native African owners of the land from 638 CE and is continuing this today in Southern Sudan, particularly now in Darfur. Europeans grabbed the rest of Africa, settled significant populations in Southern Africa, and hijacked most of the arable land in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Land is still the issue between Africa and the West in these countries even now.

The new land grabbing phenomenon started in earnest in the year 2000, and began to spiral out of control from 2004. The deals that have been concluded so far, place no obligations on the land grabbers. Agreements concerning thousands of hectares of farm land are generally just two to four pages long, and lack transparency, oversight regulations and environmental safeguards. They do not protect the small holding native farmers who lose their customary rights to their land in the deals.

The size of the deals so far is mind boggling. Foreigners are buying off Africa for pittance from ill-informed, selfish African political leaders, looking for personal gains. They put the tokens they collect from the deals, in their private accounts in Switzerland. A 2008 study of the media reports on foreigners’ recent land acquisitions in Africa by GRAIN, a non-governmental organization, and others, suggest that some 40mn hectares of farm land have been or are being grabbed by foreign interest groups. Some 10mn hectares of these have been given away for a variety of food crops and live stock farming in the Republic of Congo. Another 6mn hectares have been signed off in neighbouring countries. The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a UK research outfit, estimates that at least 2.5mn hectares have been grabbed by foreign entities since 2004 in Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Sudan. The report claims that the scale of the leases is unprecedented and that they do not have complete data on the cases because of the secrecy surrounding the deals. Commercial enterprises, many of them European as well as Chinese companies have been in the lead in cultivating Jatropha, Sorghum, and other bio-fuels, in countries such as Madagascar, Mozambique and Tanzania.

In Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, for example, only some 12 per cent of arable land is actually cultivated, so the political leaders feel they can give the rest away cheaply and without safeguards, to foreign entities. The Chinese are at the moment negotiating to lease 2.8mn hectares in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to grow oil palm, and a further 2mn hectares in Zambia, to grow Jatropha (a crop used for bio-fuels). In Mozambique, local opposition to a Chinese project to develop 100,000 hectares was based on plans to import Chinese labour.

China sees Africa as virgin land to relocate some of her teaming population. Indians too are moving into Africa. Their companies, backed by their government, have invested $1.5bn in Ethiopia, to meet rising domestic food and animal feed demand in India.

A deal by South Korea’s Daewoo Corporation to lease 1.3mn hectares of land was a key factor in building support for the overthrow of Madagascar’s President, Marc Ravalomanana, in March 2009. Sudan has agreed to lease 690,000 hectares of land to South Korea to grow wheat.

In Kenya, the government leaders there are trying to bend the rules to overcome local opposition to a proposal to give Qatar, right over some 40,000 hectares of land, in the Tana River Valley, in return for building a deep-sea port. Saudi Arabia has not been left out of all these. Saudi has already grabbed 100,000 hectares to grow corn and wheat in Toshika, Southern Egypt, and yet unspecified size of land, (because of on-going pogrom), from the displaced or eliminated African owners of the land in Southern Sudan. They have moved their peasant farmers into all the land seized from the native Africans driven out of Darfur.

Naiwu Osahon: is a renowned author, philosopher of science, mystique, leader of the world Pan-African Movement.

 

A Conversation with Professor Ann Little About the Newtown Massacre, Adam Lanza, America’s Gun Culture, and the Puzzle of White Masculinity

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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2013

A Conversation with Professor Ann Little About the Newtown Massacre, Adam Lanza, America’s Gun Culture, and the Puzzle of White Masculinity

I hope that the New Year was restful and celebratory. Before Christmas, there was a momentary “national conversation” about gun violence in the aftermath of the Newtown Massacre. Curiously, but not surprising, said moment of introspection about how America’s gun culture eats it youth has fallen off of the national radar as the pundit classes have moved on to other matters. There will be other mass shootings; we will have said “national conversation” again; nothing will be done given the NRA’s murder hold on the American people.

As I explored in a series of posts, the central question regarding the Gun Right is how these mass shootings do not lead to any serious exploration of the intersection(s) of Whiteness, White Masculinity, and mass gun violence. White men commit an overwhelming amount of the mass shootings in the United States. Yet, except for a few outliers, there is no sustained effortto engage the obvious puzzle: if white men are killing people, often by the dozens–in murders where they are the offenders at twice their rate in the general population–why are so many in the news media afraid and hostile to basic questions about “white crime?”

In my effort to explore this question, I reached out to two great scholars of American history and culture. Both kindly agreed to participate in WARN’s podcast series.

Our first guest is Professor Ann Little, author of the bookAbraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England,who writes over at the great website Historiann. In our podcast, she does a wonderful job of setting up our conversation by offering a wonderful, rich, and insightful perspective on the Newtown Massacre and the colonial era roots of the United States (near pathological) love of guns in the present

Dr. Little was so very generous with her time. We covered a great amount of material in this conversation and offered up a necessary, and to this point, very much lacking historical context for the Newtown Massacre, and the fear by many in the pundit classes to even discuss white masculinity and gun violence.

This was a real treat. I was so glad to be able to bring this dialogue to the readers of We Are Respectable Negroes and those who follow our podcast series.

I do hope you enjoy the conversation.

AUDIO

2:59 As a historian and scholar of America and gun culture, what were your first thoughts about the Newtown Massacre?
6:18 How do we begin to think broadly about masculinity and gun culture in the United States, and how it helps us to understand Adam Lanza’s murder spree?
11:22 The gun and white male citizenship in colonial America and the Founding
15:00 Is the magical thinking of Conservatives typified by the gun control debate? What are some of the regional differences in regards to gun culture in the United States? How is this surprising (or not)?
23:55 An open letter to white men. Beginning to think about White masculinity, Whiteness and gun violence
29:25 How do people respond to conversations where whiteness and masculinity are interrogated and challenged?
34:40 Is White Masculinity a story of historical continuity or change? Is White Heterosexual Masculinity static?
48:27 More context for avoiding a critical interrogation of Whiteness and gun violence: White Mediocrity and the subsidization of Whiteness vs. the myth of American Meritocracy
56:14 Historical myopia, the luxury of being white and historical memory, and the allure of believing the “White Lies” of American history
62:14 What is your “blogging story?” How does blogging fit into your academic career?
64:03 The failure of academics to be able to effectively communicate with “regular” folks who are also smart like them
69:20 Academic writing’s impact vs the audience and impact of blogging