Official Protest Thread...
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http://www.okayplayer.com/news/big-sean-raises-100000-for-flint-water-crisis.html
Big Sean Raises $100,000 For Flint Water Crisis
Big Sean has raised $100,000 for residents of Flint, Michigan, as they continue to not have access to clean water.
During an appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, the rapper and fellow Michigan native not only talked about his forthcoming album I decided, but raising money for Flint through his Sean Anderson Foundation.
“I just know it’s not even close to being over. In that situation, I feel like, it wasn’t a natural disaster. It’s something that should’ve been prevented and could’ve been prevented,” Sean said. “So it’s just disgusting to think about the damages that these families and even kids have to go through with the lead poisoning.”
During the interview Sean also revealed that his mother had experienced lead poisoning, but was able to reverse its effects through “holistic care and homeopathic remedies.”
Along with donating money to the resident of Flint, Sean also got the Flint Chosen Choir to be a part of I Decided. The ensemble is featured on “Bigger Than Me,” the last track on the album.
“Once you hear it, you’ll see why I wanted them to be on that,” he said. “But I was just happy to have Flint be a part of my album in that way, as well.”
According to a recent report from AP News, the lead levels in Flint’s water has fallen below the federal limit, but the city is still working to treat the water.
“The remarkable improvement in water quality over the past year is a testament to all levels of government working together and the resilient people of Flint helping us help them through participation in the flushing programs,”Republican Gov. Rick Snyder said in a statement. “There is still more work to do in Flint, and I remain committed to helping the residents recover and restore their city.”
(There is a vid of the interview at the sourcelink above...)
Big Sean Raises $100,000 For Flint Water Crisis
Big Sean has raised $100,000 for residents of Flint, Michigan, as they continue to not have access to clean water.
During an appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, the rapper and fellow Michigan native not only talked about his forthcoming album I decided, but raising money for Flint through his Sean Anderson Foundation.
“I just know it’s not even close to being over. In that situation, I feel like, it wasn’t a natural disaster. It’s something that should’ve been prevented and could’ve been prevented,” Sean said. “So it’s just disgusting to think about the damages that these families and even kids have to go through with the lead poisoning.”
During the interview Sean also revealed that his mother had experienced lead poisoning, but was able to reverse its effects through “holistic care and homeopathic remedies.”
Along with donating money to the resident of Flint, Sean also got the Flint Chosen Choir to be a part of I Decided. The ensemble is featured on “Bigger Than Me,” the last track on the album.
“Once you hear it, you’ll see why I wanted them to be on that,” he said. “But I was just happy to have Flint be a part of my album in that way, as well.”
According to a recent report from AP News, the lead levels in Flint’s water has fallen below the federal limit, but the city is still working to treat the water.
“The remarkable improvement in water quality over the past year is a testament to all levels of government working together and the resilient people of Flint helping us help them through participation in the flushing programs,”Republican Gov. Rick Snyder said in a statement. “There is still more work to do in Flint, and I remain committed to helping the residents recover and restore their city.”
(There is a vid of the interview at the sourcelink above...)
http://www.philly.com/philly/educat...ck_Lives_Matter_week_-_not_all_are_happy.html
Beginning Monday, the Black Lives Matter movement could become a curriculum topic in classrooms across the city.
A Philadelphia School District teachers' group has planned six days of action this week, encouraging educators to introduce optional curriculum and activities - from "The Revolution Is Always Now" coloring pages for very young students to a science lesson about the biology of skin color for older ones.
"This is a critical issue of our time - in our society, but also in our students' lives," said Charlie McGeehan, an English and history teacher and member of the Caucus of Working Educators, an activist group within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. "It's important for us to dive in."
That's not a universal sentiment.
Christopher Paslay, an English teacher at Swenson Arts and Technology High School, said he's unequivocally for equal rights and justice for all of his students, regardless of race.
But he takes issue with the Black Lives Matter movement and thinks it has no place in Philadelphia classrooms.
"It challenges nuclear families, and our justice system," Paslay said. "I don't think kids should be taught that Western society is perpetrating a war on black people."
The lessons are not mandatory, and in fact not sponsored or sanctioned either by the school system or the PFT. It's up to individual teachers whether they participate and how, from wearing T-shirts to engaging students in lessons.
That the material may be controversial - even objectionable - to some is not lost on the group, which has encouraged participants to share plans with parents.
The movement has become a shorthand for antipolice sentiment, a notion McGeehan rejects.
"We all deserve fair but critical treatment," said McGeehan, who teaches at the U School, a high school in North Philadelphia. "I don't think that Black Lives Matter is antipolice."
John McNesby, president of FOP Lodge 5 in Philadelphia, said he wasn't a fan of the idea.
"We don't agree with it," he said. "We think there's a lot better subjects that could be taught."
But, McNesby said, he didn't want to make too much of it.
"I don't think many people pay attention to that group," he said of the caucus.
Paslay said he didn't know of any teachers planning Black Lives Matter lessons, and said he thought it was a "fringe thing, but attracting a lot of headlines."
The organizers want teachers to think about lessons based on the 13 tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement, from empathy and diversity to transgender affirming and unapologetically black.
They're all important themes in a district where the majority of students are black and brown, McGeehan said. (In Philadelphia, 51 percent of pupils in district schools are black and 21 percent are Latino, according to the district.)
"We have to validate our students' experiences," McGeehan said. "Many of my students have had negative experiences with police officers. To ignore that is to deny their reality in a way that doesn't make sense."
The caucus is stressing that lessons should be developmentally appropriate; it has offered curriculum resources for elementary and secondary students. Members say the themes can easily be incorporated into Common Core standards.
For teachers unsure how to handle the subject of race, the caucus notes that "issues of race are already present in your classroom," event organizers wrote.
"You can raise awareness about this omnipresent aspect of our society without triggering conflict or anxiety in your students," they wrote in organizing materials.
Tamara Anderson, a parent and associate member of the caucus, said Philadelphia's event was inspired by a recent action in Seattle, when thousands of teachers wore T-shirts and taught lessons as a way to promote racial equity in education.
In Philadelphia, the organizers used the Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday as a kickoff. They held a happy hour to bring participants together, and plan not just events during the school day but also extracurricular activities - a parent forum, a film screening.
"We need to have these difficult conversations around bias," said Anderson, whose child attends Hill-Freedman World Academy.
Anderson expects that some families, and some students, may not agree with the movement. It's OK that people are uncomfortable, she said.
"There's a lot of things I don't support for my own child," Anderson said. "But I know for a fact that my daughter is more of a well-rounded person because she is pushed to ask questions."
Organizers said they did not have an exact number of teachers who planned to participate.
H. Lee Whack Jr., a schools spokesman, said the caucus' work is not part of the district's curriculum.
"However, the district encourages teachers to responsibly engage students around pertinent issues to develop critical thinking skills and a respect for the exchange of ideas," Whack said in a statement. "The district regularly encourages schools to look to current-event topics for appropriate teaching content that is also aligned with grade-appropriate standards."
The PFT cannot promote any activity of any caucus within the union, spokesman George Jackson said.
Beginning Monday, the Black Lives Matter movement could become a curriculum topic in classrooms across the city.
A Philadelphia School District teachers' group has planned six days of action this week, encouraging educators to introduce optional curriculum and activities - from "The Revolution Is Always Now" coloring pages for very young students to a science lesson about the biology of skin color for older ones.
"This is a critical issue of our time - in our society, but also in our students' lives," said Charlie McGeehan, an English and history teacher and member of the Caucus of Working Educators, an activist group within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. "It's important for us to dive in."
That's not a universal sentiment.
Christopher Paslay, an English teacher at Swenson Arts and Technology High School, said he's unequivocally for equal rights and justice for all of his students, regardless of race.
But he takes issue with the Black Lives Matter movement and thinks it has no place in Philadelphia classrooms.
"It challenges nuclear families, and our justice system," Paslay said. "I don't think kids should be taught that Western society is perpetrating a war on black people."
The lessons are not mandatory, and in fact not sponsored or sanctioned either by the school system or the PFT. It's up to individual teachers whether they participate and how, from wearing T-shirts to engaging students in lessons.
That the material may be controversial - even objectionable - to some is not lost on the group, which has encouraged participants to share plans with parents.
The movement has become a shorthand for antipolice sentiment, a notion McGeehan rejects.
"We all deserve fair but critical treatment," said McGeehan, who teaches at the U School, a high school in North Philadelphia. "I don't think that Black Lives Matter is antipolice."
John McNesby, president of FOP Lodge 5 in Philadelphia, said he wasn't a fan of the idea.
"We don't agree with it," he said. "We think there's a lot better subjects that could be taught."
But, McNesby said, he didn't want to make too much of it.
"I don't think many people pay attention to that group," he said of the caucus.
Paslay said he didn't know of any teachers planning Black Lives Matter lessons, and said he thought it was a "fringe thing, but attracting a lot of headlines."
The organizers want teachers to think about lessons based on the 13 tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement, from empathy and diversity to transgender affirming and unapologetically black.
They're all important themes in a district where the majority of students are black and brown, McGeehan said. (In Philadelphia, 51 percent of pupils in district schools are black and 21 percent are Latino, according to the district.)
"We have to validate our students' experiences," McGeehan said. "Many of my students have had negative experiences with police officers. To ignore that is to deny their reality in a way that doesn't make sense."
The caucus is stressing that lessons should be developmentally appropriate; it has offered curriculum resources for elementary and secondary students. Members say the themes can easily be incorporated into Common Core standards.
For teachers unsure how to handle the subject of race, the caucus notes that "issues of race are already present in your classroom," event organizers wrote.
"You can raise awareness about this omnipresent aspect of our society without triggering conflict or anxiety in your students," they wrote in organizing materials.
Tamara Anderson, a parent and associate member of the caucus, said Philadelphia's event was inspired by a recent action in Seattle, when thousands of teachers wore T-shirts and taught lessons as a way to promote racial equity in education.
In Philadelphia, the organizers used the Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday as a kickoff. They held a happy hour to bring participants together, and plan not just events during the school day but also extracurricular activities - a parent forum, a film screening.
"We need to have these difficult conversations around bias," said Anderson, whose child attends Hill-Freedman World Academy.
Anderson expects that some families, and some students, may not agree with the movement. It's OK that people are uncomfortable, she said.
"There's a lot of things I don't support for my own child," Anderson said. "But I know for a fact that my daughter is more of a well-rounded person because she is pushed to ask questions."
Organizers said they did not have an exact number of teachers who planned to participate.
H. Lee Whack Jr., a schools spokesman, said the caucus' work is not part of the district's curriculum.
"However, the district encourages teachers to responsibly engage students around pertinent issues to develop critical thinking skills and a respect for the exchange of ideas," Whack said in a statement. "The district regularly encourages schools to look to current-event topics for appropriate teaching content that is also aligned with grade-appropriate standards."
The PFT cannot promote any activity of any caucus within the union, spokesman George Jackson said.
https://thsppl.com/dear-black-men-y...e-not-pro-black-woman-49079dc68d7b#.og09s4hvu
Dear Black Men
You Are Not Pro-Black If You Are Not Pro Black Women
It’s just that simple.
Over the past few days I have gotten into heated arguments with men who have presented and positioned themselves as Pro-Black, yet they find themselves incapable of standing against a Black man who has repeatedly violated Black women.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
There is something inherently wrong with your Pro-Blackness if it is a gendered Pro-Blackness incapable of taking stances that improve the position of Black women.
There’s no Huey P. Newton in your philosophy if your main concerns are a caricature of everything the men and women who constituted the real Black Panther Party stood for.
There’s no way you can announce to the world that you are Pro-Black, yet blatantly cling to misogyny, uphold rape culture and mimic a White patriarchal system, which seeks to keep Black women underneath your boots.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
That’s
not
Pro-Black.
That
is
Black
Patriarchy.
Look around you when there is a violation of your human rights as Black men. Who is there to lead the marches and the protests and the rallies on behalf of Black men everywhere? Without a doubt it is Black women who have stood up and protested and protected Black men’s lives in this country. Why is it that we cannot return the favor? Why are we so intent on dogging Black women and insisting that those women are only out to ruin The Black Man? What you’re saying when you say things like that is that Black women are not to be trusted. That their worth and their lives are only useful when they are propping up the agenda of a Black man.
This is not any iota of what it means to be Pro-Black. Pro-Black means you fight for your people. All of your people. Not just Black men, not just straight Black men, not just Black men you think are upstanding and productive members of society, but all of your people.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
You are not Pro-Black if you erase Black women who are feminists from the conversation by telling them that feminism destroys the Black family unit.
Pick up a book. Google bell hooks. Google Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Google something scholarly. Something with the letters .edu behind it.
Google: Critical Black Feminist Thought.
Read those texts, absorb those texts. Listen to what your sisters are trying to tell you about being a Black woman in America. Hear their pain and think deeply about what you can do to help alleviate that. Do what you can to help them navigate social spaces a little bit easier. Do not erase them from existence because you don’t like hearing women say that they don’t need men. Truth is they don’t. They don’t. If anything we need them. We need their strength, we need their vibrancy, we need their softness, but most of all we need their support.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
Without Black women,
where are Black men?
That’s a question that every so-called
Black man
needs to ask himself daily.
He also needs to ask himself, what do Black women need me to do, need me to say, need me to become so that we both may improve our lots in this American pecking order that wants to put us both at the bottom rung? Those are the things that are needed, that are necessary. I never want to see a Black man questioning whether a Black woman is really here for the race again. Because Black women have been here for the entire race and will continue to do so because that’s what Black women do. They fight. They stand. They make themselves known.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
Black women are on the front lines of the fight every day, suffering in silence, suffering in plain sight.
And I get it, our concerns may be more overt — it may seem like more of us are dying at the hands of police officers, but so are Black women. Black women and girls are also at more of a risk of slipping through the cracks of the American academic system. Black women are institutionalized at higher rates than Black men.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
Black women are stigmatized by the larger society at every turn. Shouldn’t we be trying to ease their burdens instead of questioning their motives?
But I guess it’s not an issue until it hits home. I guess the rape and the silencing of Black women by powerful men is not a problem unless it is your wife, your daughter, your friend.
Understand this, Black men. It should not take someone you know being brutalized for you to wake up and realize that these women do not deserve to be treated like insurgent agents when a narrative you do not like ceases being a narrative and starts being the truth. We need each other in this crazy world, and it is past time that Pro-Black started meaning more than Pro Black Man.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
It
is
time
that
Pro-Black
means
Pro
Black Everybody.
Dear Black Men
You Are Not Pro-Black If You Are Not Pro Black Women
It’s just that simple.
Over the past few days I have gotten into heated arguments with men who have presented and positioned themselves as Pro-Black, yet they find themselves incapable of standing against a Black man who has repeatedly violated Black women.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
There is something inherently wrong with your Pro-Blackness if it is a gendered Pro-Blackness incapable of taking stances that improve the position of Black women.
There’s no Huey P. Newton in your philosophy if your main concerns are a caricature of everything the men and women who constituted the real Black Panther Party stood for.
There’s no way you can announce to the world that you are Pro-Black, yet blatantly cling to misogyny, uphold rape culture and mimic a White patriarchal system, which seeks to keep Black women underneath your boots.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
That’s
not
Pro-Black.
That
is
Black
Patriarchy.
Look around you when there is a violation of your human rights as Black men. Who is there to lead the marches and the protests and the rallies on behalf of Black men everywhere? Without a doubt it is Black women who have stood up and protested and protected Black men’s lives in this country. Why is it that we cannot return the favor? Why are we so intent on dogging Black women and insisting that those women are only out to ruin The Black Man? What you’re saying when you say things like that is that Black women are not to be trusted. That their worth and their lives are only useful when they are propping up the agenda of a Black man.
This is not any iota of what it means to be Pro-Black. Pro-Black means you fight for your people. All of your people. Not just Black men, not just straight Black men, not just Black men you think are upstanding and productive members of society, but all of your people.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
You are not Pro-Black if you erase Black women who are feminists from the conversation by telling them that feminism destroys the Black family unit.
Pick up a book. Google bell hooks. Google Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Google something scholarly. Something with the letters .edu behind it.
Google: Critical Black Feminist Thought.
Read those texts, absorb those texts. Listen to what your sisters are trying to tell you about being a Black woman in America. Hear their pain and think deeply about what you can do to help alleviate that. Do what you can to help them navigate social spaces a little bit easier. Do not erase them from existence because you don’t like hearing women say that they don’t need men. Truth is they don’t. They don’t. If anything we need them. We need their strength, we need their vibrancy, we need their softness, but most of all we need their support.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
Without Black women,
where are Black men?
That’s a question that every so-called
Black man
needs to ask himself daily.
He also needs to ask himself, what do Black women need me to do, need me to say, need me to become so that we both may improve our lots in this American pecking order that wants to put us both at the bottom rung? Those are the things that are needed, that are necessary. I never want to see a Black man questioning whether a Black woman is really here for the race again. Because Black women have been here for the entire race and will continue to do so because that’s what Black women do. They fight. They stand. They make themselves known.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
Black women are on the front lines of the fight every day, suffering in silence, suffering in plain sight.
And I get it, our concerns may be more overt — it may seem like more of us are dying at the hands of police officers, but so are Black women. Black women and girls are also at more of a risk of slipping through the cracks of the American academic system. Black women are institutionalized at higher rates than Black men.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
Black women are stigmatized by the larger society at every turn. Shouldn’t we be trying to ease their burdens instead of questioning their motives?
But I guess it’s not an issue until it hits home. I guess the rape and the silencing of Black women by powerful men is not a problem unless it is your wife, your daughter, your friend.
Understand this, Black men. It should not take someone you know being brutalized for you to wake up and realize that these women do not deserve to be treated like insurgent agents when a narrative you do not like ceases being a narrative and starts being the truth. We need each other in this crazy world, and it is past time that Pro-Black started meaning more than Pro Black Man.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
It
is
time
that
Pro-Black
means
Pro
Black Everybody.