Josephine Baker embodied a curvier form of the ideal black woman. / Walery/Getty Images

Black Women and Fat

By ALICE RANDALL

Published: May 5, 2012

FOUR out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.

What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

The black poet Lucille Clifton’s 1987 poem “Homage to My Hips” begins with the boast, “These hips are big hips.” She establishes big black hips as something a woman would want to have and a man would desire. She wasn’t the first or the only one to reflect this community knowledge. Twenty years before, in 1967, Joe Tex, a black Texan, dominated the radio airwaves across black America with a song he wrote and recorded, “Skinny Legs and All.” One of his lines haunts me to this day: “some man, somewhere who’ll take you baby, skinny legs and all.” For me, it still seems almost an impossibility.

Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not.

How many white girls in the ’60s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears.

How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.

But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.

Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me that her husband, also a tenured professor and of color, begged her not to lose “the sugar down below” when she embarked on a weight-loss program.

And it’s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It’s politics too. To get a quick introduction to the politics of black fat, I recommend Andrea Elizabeth Shaw’s provocative book “The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies.” Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black woman’s body “functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.” By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.

When the biologist Daniel Lieberman suggested in a public lecture at Harvard this past February that exercise for everyone should be mandated by law, the audience applauded, the Harvard Gazette reported. A room full of thin affluent people applauding the idea of forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise appalls me. Government mandated exercise is a vicious concept. But I get where Mr. Lieberman is coming from. The cost of too many people getting too fat is too high.

I live in Nashville. There is an ongoing rivalry between Nashville and Memphis. In black Nashville, we like to think of ourselves as the squeaky-clean brown town best known for our colleges and churches. In contrast, black Memphis is known for its music and bars and churches. We often tease the city up the road by saying that in Nashville we have a church on every corner and in Memphis they have a church and a liquor store on every corner. Only now the saying goes, there’s a church, a liquor store and a dialysis center on every corner in black Memphis.

The billions that we are spending to treat diabetes is money that we don’t have for education reform or retirement benefits, and what’s worse, it’s estimated that the total cost of America’s obesity epidemic could reach almost $1 trillion by 2030 if we keep on doing what we have been doing.

WE have to change. Black women especially. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks have 51 percent higher obesity rates than whites do. We’ve got to do better. I’ve weighed more than 200 pounds. Now I weigh less. It will always be a battle.

My goal is to be the last fat black woman in my family. For me that has meant swirling exercise into my family culture, of my own free will and volition. I have my own personal program: walk eight miles a week, sleep eight hours a night and drink eight glasses of water a day.

I call on every black woman for whom it is appropriate to commit to getting under 200 pounds or to losing the 10 percent of our body weight that often results in a 50 percent reduction in diabetes risk. Sleeping better may be key, as recent research suggests that lack of sleep is a little-acknowledged culprit in obesity. But it is not just sleep, exercise and healthy foods we need to solve this problem — we also need wisdom.

I expect obesity will be like alcoholism. People who know the problem intimately find their way out, then lead a few others. The few become millions.

Down here, that movement has begun. I hold Zumba classes in my dining room, have a treadmill in my kitchen and have organized yoga classes for women up to 300 pounds. And I’ve got a weighted exercise Hula-Hoop I call the black Cadillac. Our go-to family dinner is sliced cucumbers, salsa, spinach and scrambled egg whites with onions. Our go-to snack is peanut butter — no added sugar or salt — on a spoon. My quick breakfast is a roasted sweet potato, no butter, or Greek yogurt with six almonds.

That’s soul food, Nashville 2012.

I may never get small doing all of this. But I have made it much harder for the next generation, including my 24-year-old daughter, to get large.

++++++++++++

Alice Randall is a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Ada’s Rules.”

__________________________

Let's Get Real:

A Reponse to Alice Randall's

'Black Women and Fat'

I tried to ignore Alice Randall's op-ed in the New York Times Opinion pages after reading the title. I've grown weary of any title that consists of the terms "Black Women" and "weight," so I figured I would save myself from any possible annoyance. Of course, this fabulous invention called the internet simply would not let me be great. Randall's piece was everywhere - from my Twitter timeline to my gmail inbox. So giving into the peer pressure, I clicked on the link leading to it and had my initial fears confirmed. Once again, black women are on the receiving end of a scolding for the rise of obesity in the U.S.

>via: http://www.forharriet.com/2012/05/lets-get-real-reponse-to-alice-randall.html...

__________________________

The Warning Signs Are There

Eleanor Hinton Hoytt is the president and chief executive of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

MAY 7, 2012

>via: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/07/women-weight-and-wellness/the...

__________________________

One Size Does Not Fit All

Stephanie Covington Armstrong, a writer and speaker, is the author of "Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Story of Bulimia."

UPDATED MAY 7, 2012, 7:18 PM

>via: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/07/women-weight-and-wellness/one...

"Prove it on Me"

New Negro women

 

By Lauren Kientz Anderson

I read something very exciting this week, the introduction of Erin Chapman's 2012 Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s. She argues many of the things I was searching to find here and here. I took four pages of notes on the introduction, and would love to share the quotes I so ardently took down, but in fairness to her and you, I'll just share a couple. But I urge you to go read her work if you are interested in the politics of respectability, the way popular culture influences society, the New Negro era, or the limits imposed on feminism.

"Prove it on me" is a quote from a Ma Rainey song, which flirts with the audience and dares them to prove she's done anything wrong. She "knows she is not completely free, but she acts independently anyway. ... In the face of social and moral condemnation, this New Negro woman determined to shape her own identity and fate." (3) But while she and other New Negro women insisted "on her right to enjoy, as sociologist E. Franklin Frazier lamented, the era's 'larger freedom of women,'" at the same time, "the question remained whether women, especially African American women, really had any more social, political, or economic power than they had had before." The spectacle of freedom, rather than its reality "overshadowed the ongoing political suppression and exclusion of most black women's voices. Instead of representing liberation, the prevalence of such spectacle indicated society's use of black women's bodies, images, and subjectivities to 'prove' --establish, test, assert, flout--the countless quandaries in gender roles, sexuality, and morality presented by the modern era and its new race politics." (4)

Chapman captures the tension I mentioned in my first post on the politics of respectability, though she frames in terms of the New Negro debate over the meaning of art. Perhaps that was my mistake in the first post--not recognizing the transition between the politics of respectability and New Negro Modernism. After reading Chapman's introduction, I can see how much the women I study straddle that line, sometimes evoking the one and sometimes evoking the other.

"Although modern African Americans determined to shape their own destinies, both in personal and political terms, and to take leading roles in the newly configured discursive debate over black humanity and worth, there was little agreement about the best means of accomplishing these aspirations. Thus, New Negroes were divided into two major camps. There were those who sought to modernize and professionalize established ideologies of racial advancement, solidarity, and uplift through a New Negro progressivism.... Others.. questioned, if not the very idea of racial solidarity itself, then at least the obligation of racial allegiance and respectability, and instead touted a radical individualism and independence from all but the most personal allegiances to 'art' or 'self' or some other self-generated ideal." (10)

Chapman moves from the sex-race marketplace to the intrarace dialogue about the proper role of women and sexual morality. She argues that while "class-biased" uplift ideology of the National Association of Colored Women dominated what she calls the Reconstruction generation, a masculine-impulse dominated the New Negro era (12). The New Negroes "accentuated the manhood rights of the black male worker as a tenet of racial advancement" (11). Their politics led to an emphasis on what Chapman defines as "race motherhood," which was not the heir of Reconstruction era feminism, "but a discourse confining black women's subjectivity, identity, and activity to others' support and use." (13)

Chapman's thesis represents a direct challenge to me: "As the great migration and converging economic and technological changes precipitated the formation of the sex-race marketplace that would shape the course of twentieth-century race politics and racialized popular culture, so too did the modern racial discourse motivate the development of an intra-racial discourse of race motherhood. Together, they rendered black women largely invisible, their subjectivity flat and inhuman, for the greater part of that century." (14)

 My work is all about New Negro women who updated uplift ideology for a modern world. I argue these women were not invisible in their Harlem society nor outside of it, to YWCA women, Pan-African leaders, the League of Nations and others. Chapman very explicitly says that her work is not about the women themselves or their "quotidian experiences," but rather about the "social forces shaping" "the meanings dominant society, New Negro politics, and black women themselves made and attempted to make out of black women's subjectivities." (15)

Despite our different pursuits and methodologies, Chapman's work is going to be very helpful to me as I attempt to understand the lived experience and inhabited ideas of four black New Negro women who traveled internationally because she defines the social forces constraining these women and against which they struggled. Can't wait to read the rest of the book!

 

Author: Lauren Kientz Anderson

 

AP History:

Delta Blues Great

Robert Johnson

• Posted by Sound Check on September 5, 2011 

There are some musicians whose legend overshadows their work itself. Artists whose massive volume of work is worthy of legend are often reduced to small anecdotes: Van Gogh cut off his ear, Ozzy bit the head off a bat, Brian Wilson befriended serial killers and could only write in a sandbox. In the case of delta blues great Robert Johnson, who in his lifetime only recorded a meager 29 songs, the legend of him selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads for guitar ability is so attractive because it is one of the few things we know at all about him.

Contributor: Nathan Leigh

For the uninitiated, the legend goes something like this:

Raised in Robinsonville Mississippi, Robert Johnson began his music career as a capable but unremarkable harmonica player. After the death of his young wife in childbirth, Johnson began tagging along with local blues legend Son House to gigs. Although Johnson was an able harmonic player, House considered his guitar playing embarrassing. At 20, Johnson moved to Martinsville, Mississippi and there he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for talent at the guitar. He was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. There a large black man took his guitar, tuned it, and handed it back. When Johnson returned to Robinsonville a year and a half later, he had become a true master of the instrument, surpassing even Son House's skill by his own admission.

 

 

Like most people who came of age in the heyday of Napster, I experienced history out of order. After having been exposed to the Dead Kennedys and taken to countless Darkbuster and The Unseen shows in my youth, I remember actually hearing the Ramones for this first time and being utterly baffled that people considered it “punk.” What in those sunny harmonies and goofy lyrics reflected my suburban anger and desire to rebel? I had the same experience listening to the Grateful Dead for the first time, and not understanding how their affable Americana inspired such surreal and psychedelic imagery. I was similarly caught off guard by Robert Johnson's music the first time I heard it. Familiar with his legend, I expected the music be somehow “Satanic.” Maybe not like the industrial music derided in my youth for its' demonic overtones (it seems almost quaint now how many scandalized teachers demanded that students removed their Marilyn Manson t-shirts), but certainly I expected it to be more rebellious, heavier than other delta blues. What I heard instead was the sound of pain and hardship. The music of someone who had known a hard life and loneliness. Far from being “devil music,” this was the epitome of the blues.

 

 

Robert Johnson was far from the first artist accused of selling his soul to the devil for his talent, and far from the last. Living in an era where religious music was not simply relegated to the bottom half of the FM dial, Johnson was an unapologetic secular musician. At the time, playing secular music was literally referred to as selling one's soul to the devil. Johnson courted and encouraged the association with his songs like Hellhound On My Trail, and Me and the Devil Blues.

 

“Early this morning
When you knocked upon my door
And I said hello Satan
I believe it's time to go”
* Robert Johnson Me and the Devil Blues

 

 

Although Me and the Devil Blues is ultimately a song about an abusive husband and Hellhound on My Trail is one of Robert Johnson's many odes to wanderlust, the two songs are routinely cited as proof of Johnson's Faustian bargain. Johnson further compounded the rumor by studying guitar with Martinsville guitarist Ike Zinnerman in a graveyard. The superstitious of the town believed the two were gaining skill from the spirits of the dead. The pragmatic acknowledge that it was likely one of the few quiet places in town they could practice at night.

 

 

In the feel-good TV movie version of his life, Johnson would return from Martinsville (skipping over the fact that he abandoned his new wife and child after a year and a half) to critical and financial success. Roll credits. But Robert Johnson's career as a professional bluesman was anything but successful and easy. He hitch hiked from town to town across the midwest and south, often playing for tips and meals in jook joints. Johnson's greatest success, and ultimately his greatest legacy came in 1936 and 37 when he recorded a handful of songs for Texas based Brunswick Records.

 

 

The songs Johnson recorded over two recording sessions have become known as some of the greatest recordings ever made in the blues era. His guitar work was passionate, dynamic, and technically masterful, while his voice showed a degree of control and subtlety that is often overshadowed by his pain and intensity. Some of the 78's became small regional hits during his lifetime, while most would not be released until after his death.

 

 

Like the story of his sudden metamorphosis from an amateur to one of the greatest guitarists ever to live, the story of Johnson's death has achieved mythical proportions. There are countless small variations depending on who is telling it, but what is generally agreed upon is that Johnson was cut down in the prime of his career in a fit of irony worthy of Alanis Morissette. (note: afropunk.com does not condone or sanction Ms. Morissette's flagrant disregard for the actual meaning of the word irony.).

 

 

While performing at a jook joint outside of Greenwood, Mississippi, Robert Johnson was handed a bottle of whiskey laced with poison. Most versions of the story agree that it was poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman Johnson had been flirting with. Sometimes he is the owner of the joint and sometimes simply an audience member. Sometimes the poison is strychnine and sometimes it's something else. Over the next three days, according to witnesses, Johnson's condition worsened considerably until he died convulsing in pain. Barely 27, Johnson was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere near Greenwood. Meanwhile famed talent scout John Hammond was searching out Robert Johnson to invite him to perform at Carnegie Hall.

 

 

Despite decades of research and the efforts of a small army of music historians, a full accounting of the undisputed facts about Robert Johnson's life would barely fill a paragraph. Extrapolations, interpolations, rumors, and hearsay about his life could (and do) fill volumes. In the end there are 42 known recordings of him. 29 songs with 13 alternate takes. A decade long career as one of the greatest delta blues guitarists of all time, if not the greatest, reduced to a mere one hour and 42 minutes. Perhaps that is why his legend still fascinates and remains one of the most iconic stories of the blues era. His music is timeless, but finite. But speculation and rumor can entertain forever.

 

 

 

Boaz Publishing Company was founded in 1996 by Tom Southern and Elizabeth Vahlsing in Albany, California. We publish fiction, poetry, and general non-fiction for sale through the book trade to general interest readers.

We publish opportunistically, whenever we discover a good match between author and publisher. Just as ancient Boaz discovered Ruth gleaning the alien corn, we are moved to publish when we discover great beauty in underappreciated manuscripts.

Our books are distributed to the book trade by New Harbinger Publications. Visit them at www.newharbingerpublications.com and ask for our books at your local bookstore.

We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts at the present time. We can be reached by email: tom@boazpublishing.com

Tom and Elizabeth

 

 

Submissions for the 2012 Fabri Literary Prize now being accepted.  Click Here to go to the submissions page.

                         Deadline for entry is June 15, 2012

Submissions guidelines: 
Submit the first 50 to 100 pages of your unpublished novel in pdf or Word file format. 
There is never a fee to enter. 

Questions? Email Tom Southern, Boaz Publisher
tom@boazpublishing.com 

In 2006 Dr. Matthew McKay established the Fabri Literary Prize to honor the memory of Frances Fabri. A holocaust survivor, Frances spearheaded efforts in the US to record survivor stories, creating the interviewing protocols that are used widely today.

 

The Fabri Literary Prize recognizes the work of aspiring novelists by providing funds directly to authors, by publishing their novels in attractive trade editions, and by publicizing their work to literary reviewers, librarians, and booksellers.

The 2012 prizewinner will receive a publishing contract with a $7,500 advance and a $5,000 marketing budget. The winning novel will be published in the Spring of 2013 in a hardcover or trade paperback edition by Counterpoint/Softskull Press and distributed to the book trade by Publishers Group West.

The contest is open to American novelists. Submitted manuscripts must be unpublished and written for educated adults with broad interests. Excluded from consideration are books for children or young adults and books that are focused on the religious market.

The inaugural Fabri Prize was awarded to David Fuller Cook of Durham, NC for his novel Reservation Nation.

“Entering the contest and being awarded the inaugural Fabri Literary Prize for Reservation Nation, came as an affirmation for the inexplicable light of confidence,  that my writing is worth the reading. That the Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune praised the book was valuable, but it touched me most deeply that  Indian Country, the nation’s largest Native American news source, gave it a thumbs up.   I thank Boaz Publishing Company for making this possible.”

To learn more about Reservation Nation and David Cook, click here.

The 2008 Fabri Prize was awarded to Eli Brown of Oakland, CA, for his first novel, The Great Days.

Of The Great Days, Publishers’ Weekly says,

 ”The story of a troubled young cult member, this debut novel from poet Brown is a carefully-imagined tale of delusion and disillusion….With lyrical, confident prose, Brown makes August’s dark journey a harrowing, convincing look into the heart of cult life that should linger with readers.”

And The Philadelphia Inquirer says,

“…a story that peers into the inner minds of the faithful…The Great Days is accomplished and enormously powerful.”

To learn more, click here.

The $1000 Black Orchid

Novella Award for

unpublished work of fiction

(worldwide)

Deadline: 31 May 2012

(Note: international submissions are welcome, so long as they are in English.)

An important part of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe's opus are novellas. To celebrate this format the Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine have partnered to sponsor the Black Orchid Novella Award.

Want to submit an entry for the this year's contest? It's important that you read the rules and follow the procedures carefully.

CONTEST ENTRY QUALIFICATIONS

• Each entry must be an original unpublished work of fiction that conforms to the tradition of the Nero Wolfe series.

• The mystery should be "traditional" in flavor.

• The crime must be solved using the deductive abilities of the sleuth. No coincidences.

• The killer must be known to the victim. No random pycho shootings.

• The characters (male or female) must have an engaging relationship.

• There needs to be some wit.

• The timing could be retro or current.

• There should be no explicit sex or violence.

• The detective could be a professional or amateur.

• The setting could be NYC or Boston or wherever.

• We're not looking for anything derivative of the Nero Wolfe character, milieu, etc.

CONTEST PROCEDURES

• Entries must be 15,000 to 20,000 words in length, and submitted by the deadline. Entries must be postmarked by May 31, of the submission year.

• The winner will be announced at The Wolfe Pack’s Annual Black Orchid Banquet in New York City, the first Saturday of December.

• The Black Orchid Novella Award is a blind contest. In order to be considered, your manuscript must follow the standards set out below exactly. Your manuscript must:

• Be typed and printed in Times Roman, 12 pt., double spaced, single side only, with 1 inch margins. All pages must be numbered.

• Be a copy—please keep the original—manuscripts will not be returned

• Contain two cover sheets:

• Top cover sheet should list your name, address, phone number, novella title, word count, and number of pages

• The bottom cover sheet should list only the title of the manuscript, the word count, and the number of pages.

• Include a header on every page containing the title and page number only. Do not put your name or contact information on the manuscript except on one of the two cover sheets as described above.

• If you’d like, you’re welcome to include a self-addressed, stamped postcard. The postcard will be mailed to you to indicate our receipt of your novella.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q. Can you tell me more about the distinction between a Novella and a Short Story?

A. Heed the words of Linda Landigran, editor-in-chief of AHMM. She says, "We need to stress that a novella is not a padded short story. A novella needs to be as tight and fast-paced as a short story or a novel. Authors need to ensure that the story they want to tell is properly sized for whatever format they choose."

Q. Do you require a submission cover letter with synopsis to enter the Black Orchid contest?

A: No, but you must include two cover sheets:

Top cover sheet should list your name, address, phone number, novella title, word count, and number of pages

The bottom cover sheet should list only the title of the manuscript, the word count, and the number of pages.

Q. I would like to know if The Wolfe Pack's Black Orchid Novella Award is an international contest.

A: Yes, international submissions are welcome -- so long as they're in English.

Q. Electronic submission?

A. No electronic submissions will be accepted, I'm afraid. Please follow the submission instructions posted on this site.

Q. In the rules, the phrase, "conforms to the tradition of the Nero Wolfe series" would be in regards to mood and general plot structure, correct? The rest of the rules seem to indicate you don't want anything that is too derivative of Mr. Stout's work, or takes place in the (for lack of a better phrase) "Nero Wolfe universe."

A. You are correct. You can't use the characters or the universe. But as long as the "feel" is such that it honors the tradition (and the meaning of that term is, of course, likely to vary by individual), you can write anything you want. Note that the detective doesn't have to be a man or a private detective; etc.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

For inquiries: contact Jane K. Cleland (Chair) via the contact form

For submissions: submissions must be made by snail mail to this address - Jane K. Cleland, P.O. Box 3233, New York, NY 10163-3233

Website: http://www.nerowolfe.org

 

via writersafrika.blogspot.com

Announcing the 2012 Farafina Trust

Creative Writing Workshop

Posted on April 13, 2012

Farafina Trust will be holding a creative writing workshop in Lagos, organized by award-winning writer and creative director of Farafina Trust, Chimamanda Adichie, from August 14 to August 24 2012. The workshop is sponsored by Nigerian Breweries Plc. Guest writers, including the Caine Prize-winning Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, and Jeffery Allen, will co-teach the workshop alongside Adichie.

The workshop will take the form of a class. Participants will be assigned a wide range of reading exercises, as well as daily writing exercises. The aim of the workshop is to improve the craft of Nigerian writers and to encourage published and unpublished writers by bringing different perspectives to the art of storytelling. Participation is limited only to those who apply and are accepted.

Submission details:
All material must be pasted or written in the body of the e-mail. Please DO NOT include any attachments in your e-mail. Applications with attachments will be automatically disqualified. The deadline for submissions is June 25 2012. Only those accepted to the workshop will be notified by July 31 2012. Accommodation in Lagos will be provided for all accepted applicants who are able to attend for the ten-day duration of the workshop. A literary evening of readings, open to the public, will be held at the end of the workshop on August 24, 2012.

To apply, send an e-mail to Udonandu2012@gmail.com. Your e-mail subject should read: ‘Workshop Application.’

The body of the e-mail should contain the following:
1. Your name
2. Your address
3. A few sentences about yourself
4. A writing sample of between 200 and 800 words. The sample can be either fiction or non-fiction.

Interview:

EXAMINED LIFE:

Dr. Cornel West on

TRUTH

__________________________

 

Cornel West, activists

convicted for

disorderly conduct at

stop-and-frisk protests

By theGrio 05/07/2012

Cornel West leaves criminal court Thursday, May 3, 2012, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Twenty activists were convicted Friday of disorderly conduct at a protest over a contentious police policy, ending a trial that they used to spotlight their message but that prosecutors said was about the conduct of the protesters, not the police.

A Manhattan judge convicted all the defendants in one of the biggest political protest group trials in the city in recent years. It drew extra attention for counting Princeton University professor and civil rights advocate Cornel West among the defendants, arrested Oct. 21 while standing in front of a police station door to protest the stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking of hundreds of thousands of people annually.

"(The court) did justice. I disagree, but that is what democracy is all about," West said after court.

Convicted of an offense that is classified as a violation, not a crime, he and 18 of the others were sentenced to time served, the relatively brief period they were in custody after their arrests. One defendant, a performance artist who had gotten into a vehement exchange with prosecutors on the witness stand, was sentenced to two days of community service.

The demonstrators stood in front of a Harlem police precinct, carrying signs and chanting slogans opposing the stop-and-frisk tactic.

Prosecutors said the protesters blocked the sidewalk and stationhouse entrance and ignored an order to move, even after a police captain went to them one-by-one to warn that they would be arrested. Prosecutors argued the demonstrators were seeking to stress their point by getting arrested, and so they did.

"Each chose to defy an order to clear a path to the stationhouse door . . . so that they could have this trial," Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Michelle Bayer said in an opening statement.

Some demonstrators said they had been willing to risk ending up in custody, but they argued that they didn't break the law.

The demonstrators "educated themselves as to where that line was" between constitutionally protected protest and breaking the law, "and they deliberately went right up to the cutting edge," defense lawyer Paul L. Mills said in a closing argument. "That's what gets attention, and that's what the First Amendment respects."

The protesters followed a police instruction to move back to leave a path on the sidewalk, and no one was kept from entering or leaving a stationhouse that had two doors, they and their lawyers said. The police orders were confusing and sometimes inaudible, they added.

The demonstrators took the trial as an opportunity to sound their message from the witness stand. All but one testified, sometimes recounting his or her stop-and-frisk experiences.

The New York Police Department conducted more than 684,000 of the street stops last year. Police say those stopped were behaving suspiciously -- by moving furtively or carrying a pry bar, for instance -- but they weren't necessarily suspects sought in any particular crime.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said police can stop and question people based on "reasonable suspicion," and the NYPD says the stops are a valuable crime-fighting tool. While relatively few -- 12 percent last year -- result in arrests or summonses, the stops also turned up more than 8,200 weapons, including 819 guns, police said.

To opponents, stop-and-frisks treat innocent people with suspicion and reflect racial profiling. About 87 percent of those stopped were minorities, compared to 53 percent of New York City's population.

The demonstrators were disappointed by the judge's verdict but not surprised, Mills said.

"You can't fight the system and be surprised when things don't go your way in a government proceeding," he said. But, he added, "It became an extraordinary and uplifting experience for us, that we were involved in it and involved with each other."

___

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.

 

"A Man's Story"

- The documentary of

fashion designer

Ozwald Boateng

 

A Man's Story, the Ozwald Boateng documentary, will open in UK theaters today (March 9th), see Shadow and Act for more details. Needless to say Boateng is the famous British fashion designer of Ghanaian descent from London. See the trailer. Interesting to see even if you're not into fashion!

A Man’s Story is the documentary film covering the last 12 years of Ozwald Boateng’s life. Capturing the journey and evolution of him as a man as well as a designer.

Trailer

But there is more to Boateng than just bespoke suits. In a CNN documentary he also talks about his views on Africa (part 2). About his succes he made an interesting comment.

When asked if he as a British born black person felt an outsider when he opened his shop on Savile Row, the fashion lane of the old British establishment, he said. “No, I didn't have those typical hang-ups or issues with colour.” I don't know who does have typical hang-ups or issues with colour, but of course I have an idea what he referring to.

 

 

__________________________

CLERGY REBUKES MEDIA

FOR ASKING

WRONG QUESTION

ABOUT AMENDMENT ONE

May 6th, 2012 - In a press conference held in Greensboro, North Carolina, Clergy from around the state gathered together to pray for the wisdom of it's citizens regarding the May 8th vote on Amendment One. In that conference, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber took the time to rebuke the media for asking the wrong questions regarding the amendment.

__________________________

 

North Carolina Voters Pass

Same-Sex Marriage Ban

Ken Blevins/Wilmington Star News, via Associated Press

North Carolina joined 29 other states and the rest of the South by approving a constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage.

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Published: May 8, 2012

As expected, North Carolinians voted in large numbers on Tuesday for an amendment that would ban same-sex marriages, partnerships and civil unions, becoming the 30th state in the country and the last in the South to include a prohibition on gay marriage in the state constitution.

About half a million people voted early, a record for a primary in the state, and turnout on Tuesday appeared to have been unusually high for a primary as well. The amendment was on the ballot along with other party primary races, some of which were closely contested.

The vote came after weeks of heated debate in church pews and over the airwaves. More than $3 million was spent on the rival campaigns. Ministers formed coalitions pushing for and against the measure, and cities passed resolutions condemning it. Former President Bill Clinton and the Rev. Billy Graham weighed in on opposite sides, and law professors skirmished over the consequences. 

North Carolina, a religious but also relatively moderate state on social issues, already has a law banning same-sex marriage. But Republican lawmakers pushed an amendment out of concern that the law was in danger of being struck down by judges.

While public opinion is shifting rapidly across the country and same-sex marriage continues to achieve legal recognition state by state, polls in North Carolina before the vote showed a narrowing but comfortable margin for passage.

Opponents tried to fight the polling gap with money — raising almost twice as much as the supporters — and with a robust network of volunteers and get-out-the-vote workers.

Jeremy Kennedy, the campaign manager for the main opposition group, Coalition to Protect All NC Families, said opponents of the amendment had studied the fate of the so-called personhood amendment in Mississippi, which was defeated in November not because the electorate supported abortion rights but largely because of concerns that the amendment’s language was far too broad and could have unintended consequences.

The North Carolina amendment declares that “marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.”

A group of family law professors across the state called the language vague and untested, and warned that, in addition to applying to all variations of same-sex unions, it could also apply to the more than 150,000 straight couples in the state who live together but are unmarried. This could invalidate domestic-violence protections, undercut child custody arrangements and jeopardize hospital visiting rights, they said.

Three law professors from Campbell University, a Baptist college about 30 miles south of Raleigh, came out with a paper contesting this analysis, saying that this “much broader view of the amendment and its consequences has little support in the amendment’s language or context, or in court decisions from North Carolina or other states.”

Polling showed that feelings about the issue were divided in North Carolina as they are across much of the nation: along generational lines, with younger voters opposed to the amendment.