The Year in Racial Justice, 2011 [VIDEO]
| From Troy Davis to Occupy Wall Street, Oprah Winfrey to the National Book Awards, the jobs crisis to the fight for humane immigration policy--we look back at 2011's biggest stories. Watch Colorlines.com's year in review.      |
Best of 2011: Yo-Yo Ma and Lil' Buck
 We close each day on a positive note with our Celebrate Love posts. So as the 2011 year comes to a close, we wanted to end it with our favorite Love stories of the year. We culled through the stories that were shared the most on Facebook, and chose our fav 5 stories from the list. We will be featuring a post everyday this week, in no particular order. Today we have "Yo-Yo Ma Shows Love for Lil' Buck's Brand of Street Dance" bringing together our love for dance, hip-hop and classical music. We love that our readers love our Celebrate Love series as much as we do. Enjoy! ******** #3 Yo-Yo Ma Shows Love for Lil' Buck's Brand of Street Dance An audience of over 100 grade school students at Los Angeles's Inner City Arts got a big treat recently when world famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma teamed up with locally-based dancer Charles Riley for a rendition of "The Dying Swan." In the performance, Ma uses his high-brow style of performance to provide the soundtrack for Riley's style of interpretive urban dance. The two offered up their talents in order to highlight the need for more government-sponsored arts programs. You can see the whole thing in the video that's above. Ma, a Presidential Media of Freedom Award Recipient, is already world renowned. But LA-based Charles Riley, known by his stage name Lil' Buck, is just starting to make a name on the national scene. The twenty-two-year old is the 2011 Vail International Dance Festival's Artist-in-Residence and does a style of dance known as "jookin'", which originated in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. He also taught the kids how a Michael Jackson-style moonwalk as Ma played Jackson's "Billie Jean." "All the things that they talk about these days, with where our country is going -- we need an innovative and knowledge work force," Ma told Southern California Public Radio. "The best way to build innovation and creative imagination - and the most efficient way to do it - is actually by movement, visualizing, sound." "We can build community like nothing else," Ma continued. "All it takes is imagination, attention and empathy -- that we care." ******** We welcome your ideas for posts. Send suggestions to submissions@colorlines.com, and be sure to put Celebrate Love in the subject line. You can send links to videos, graphics, photos, quotes, whatever. Or just chime in to the comments below and we'll find you. Be sure to let us know you've got the rights to share any media you send. To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page.    |
Study: 77 Percent of Latina Retail Workers Earn Less Than $10/hr
 A new study by the Retail Action Project and the City University of New York released data that shows a dramatic gender gap in wages in the retail industry -- one in which black and Latina women are hit the hardest. The report is based on data collected by 435 retail workers at national companies. According to information pulled from those surveys, women earn an average of $9.00 per hour, compared to $10.13 per hour earned by men. Those numbers are especially pronounced for women of color --53 percent of black women and 77 percent of Latina women earn less than $10 per hour. While many retailers benefited from Black Friday weekend sales, the workers who were hired to help meet that demand are often stuck in temporary, low-wage jobs, according to the study. "We're happy that more people have the opportunity to go back to work, but the majority of jobs created are low-wage, part time, and seasonal. The retail industry is thriving and can do better," said Retail Action Project's Carrie Gleason. As big retailers like Old Navy and Toys R Us gear up for around-the-clock holiday sales, it's like women who'll be working longer hours for very little pay. Talisa Erazo, a member of the Retail Action Project put it this way in a press release: "After working at the same store for over three years, I earn only $7.90 per hour. On these earnings I support my mom who lives on disability, contribute money for rent, food, transportation, and cover my costs for college. With the holidays, it gets even tougher." The National Organization for Women (NOW) has called for more industry accountability on the issue, and the Retail Action Project has started a Change.org petition that calls for equal pay for equal work. See more about the study's findings at the Retail Action Project.    |
Hundreds of National Guard Troops to Leave U.S.-Mexico Border
 Since 2010, over 1,200 national guard troops have been patrolling the U.S.'s southwestern border. This week, the Obama administration announced that many of those troops are leaving. More from CNN:
The announcement doesn't sit well with enforcement-happy lawmakers in the region, like Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith. "If the Obama administration's goal is border security, their actions undermine their objective," Smith said in a written statement, according to CNN. "We should keep guardsmen on the ground until the Border Patrol can gain operational control of the majority of the U.S.-Mexico border." Despite those concerns, the FBI's own statistics have shown that violence along the border is on the decline. The murder rates in cities long the border, including San Diego, Phoenix, Tucscon and El Paso, have all declined faster than the national murder rate in recent years.    |
Rihanna Fires Back at Former Editor of Dutch Magazine
 Late yesterday, Rihanna shot back at Eva Hoeke, the former editor of Dutch fashion magazine "Jackie," who disastrously oversaw a piece that ran in the mag calling the pop star the "ultimate niggabitch." Though Hoeke announced her resignation yesterday, that didn't stop Rihanna from going in on Twitter:
See more over at Parlour Magazine.    |
Our Economy Was Built on Bull. Until We Admit That, We're Screwed
 At the foot of Manhattan's Broadway Ave., just below Wall Street, stands one of the city's most reliable tourism draws: Arturo Di Modica's 3.5-ton statue of a charging bull. Since 1989, the sculpture has been an iconic symbol of American wealth, of the aggressive capitalist spirit that, it is argued, made this country great and powerful. Visitors flock from around the world to rub the bull's horns for good luck. Or they used to, at least. Now, tourists snap pictures from behind police barricades. For more than two months, the raging bull of wealth has sat caged, facing eye-to-eye with a New York Police Department cruiser as cops have worked around the clock to protect it from the Occupy Wall Street movement. The park's administrator called has the security "Orwellian." That's to say the least. If you're looking for visuals to encapsulate 2011, look no further than the bizarre scene at Di Modica's bull. Daily, the country's largest police force mobilizes to protect the idea of American prosperity from an imagined threat, while the actual economy lays gored and gutted by demonstrable and ongoing crimes. In the immediate, this perversity results from a spectacular failure of political leadership. We traveled a long, winding road to the point at which no-brainers like a modest payroll tax cut and an extension of unemployment benefits demand political brinksmanship. People of varying ideologies and partisan affiliations may debate endlessly who's more at fault, but to do so is to truly miss the forest for the trees. The ugly reality is no leader in either party has yet shown the mettle to rise and meet the enormity of today's challenges. That's not to suggest moral equivalencies. Republican leaders have been openly obstructionist, preferring a broken economy to a successful Obama presidency. Their cynicism has rarely been as bald as this week's House vote on the payroll tax cut, but they've never made much effort to conceal it. Still, even if President Obama had been given a willing Congress, the solutions he has championed aren't nearly on par with the problem. Like his congressional opponents, he insists the structural foundation of our economy remains strong. Rather than confront the core issues--inequity and instability--Obama has thrashed around with Republicans in the margins--over how to control debt, over the degree to which health care should be a commodity rather than a right, over which borrowers were the least irresponsible and thus deserving of help. Meanwhile, at each crucial juncture in his reform-branded presidency, Obama has left financial players to voluntarily take responsibility for their behavior. They remain steadfast in their refusal to do so. These bipartisan leadership failures have prolonged the immediate crisis, which dates back to 2007, when the foreclosures that would bring down the system first began consuming working-class communities of color in particular. Four years later, Republicans and Democrats alike are still working off of the optimistic notion that we need only contain the immediate problem until we can get back to growth--that we need only protect the bull with barricades until those pesky protesters disappear and allow its charge to resume. With each year that our chosen leaders have indulged this fantasy, a cancer has spread. Each year has brought new records in the poverty, hunger and inequality that will ultimately consume this country. But that's just the immediate crisis. As we move into an election year, in which U.S. residents will have prolonged debate over our collective priorities and values, we must pursue answers to a broader question. Since at least 1981, when the Reagan revolution overtook public policy, we have built an economy on two related fictions. The first is that boundless growth is sustainable. The second is that unrestrained capitalism, particularly in the financial sector, will create wealth for everyone. These are discredited ideas, and the question of 2012 must be how we begin building a society based on something different. This broader question is crucial because, in truth, the problem extends past the economy. Look around and you'll find one broken institution after another, each of them buckling under the weight of the late 20th century consensus that greed is good, that a winner-takes-all individualism will somehow improve our collective endeavors. Industries, communities, natural resources, even sports leagues have collapsed as Ronald Reagan's corrosive vision has become dominant. Meanwhile, racism and racial injustice remain rooted in our society in no small part because they are necessary to explain why unrestrained capitalism and unfettered growth fail so spectacularly in creating widespread wealth. The entrenched, generational poverty that has gripped so many black communities and the yawning racial gaps that persist in wealth and income, among other things, can only be explained if they are blamed on the individuals hurt by them. Thus "welfare queens" and "super predator" youth and cheating "illegals" and "lazy Indians" and on and on. These caricatures continue to inform public policy on poverty, education, immigration and more. They continue to explain away inequity and provide villians against which struggling whites can define themselves without questioning the larger system. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s quote about slave owners--the original unrestrained capitalists--still ri! ngs true: "The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow." Di Modica offered a quote on capitalism, too. In November, Newark's Star-Ledger asked the artist what he thought about the security around his statue. He didn't like it. "The bull is for the people," he declared. "The bull is for everyone, the people with money and the people with no money." If only it were so. Wall Street's bull markets have proven to be for the benefit of a very few. But as the financial industry's largest players have been unleashed to pursue profit for themselves at all costs, the dreadful consequences have surely impacted everyone. Pensions have been wiped out. Family homes have been stripped of value, many taken away altogether. Small businesses have been locked out of credit markets. More than 14 million people are exiled from the labor force. A galling one in three black children and nearly as many Latino children are growing up in poverty right now, while the president brags about ferreting out fraud in the food stamp program rather than getting more money for it. Our chosen political leaders have tolerated all of this in order to maintain the fiction that our economic system still works, that the organizing principles of our society remain valid. So the central question of 2012's likely all-consuming political debate must be simple: How do we acknowledge that our current economy is built on lies and then start erecting a new one based on equity and sustainability?    |
Best of 2011's Love: 67 Sueños and the Undocumented Majority
| We close each day on a positive note with our Celebrate Love posts. So as the 2011 year comes to a close, we wanted to end it with our favorite Love stories of the year. We culled through the stories that were shared the most on Facebook, and chose our fave 5 stories from the list. We will be featuring a post everyday this week, in no particular order. Today we have "67 Sueños Show Love for an Undocumented Majority." There are many immigrant youth hustling to get a good education amidst tough barriers, and their voices can go unheard. 67 Sueños shares their stories with us. We love that our readers love our Celebrate Love series as much as we do. Enjoy! ******** #2 67 Sueños Show Love for an Undocumented Majority Over at New America Media's Youth Outlook, Josue Rojas and Ann Bassette bring us the tale of 67 Sueños, a youth-led collective based in Oakland that strives to tell the stories of everyday young people who are often left out of the national narrative on immigration reform. The group's name is a response to a recent report put out by the Migration Policy Institute, which estimates that 67 percent of undocumented youth and young adults wouldn't qualify for the DREAM Act. Given that stark statistic, the collective's working to give voice to folks who are neither criminals nor class valedictorians. "Our young folks don't want to be separated from their one cousin who did get a 4.0," says one of the group's founders. "The struggle is the same struggle, and one deportation in that family effects the entire family." ******** We welcome your ideas for posts. Send suggestions to submissions@colorlines.com, and be sure to put Celebrate Love in the subject line. You can send links to videos, graphics, photos, quotes, whatever. Or just chime in to the comments below and we'll find you. Be sure to let us know you've got the rights to share any media you send. To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page.    |
