by: God
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Category Archives: spark your spirit
how do you think?
This is so ridiculous I don’t even know what to say about it. Other than, I’m actually glad he said it because I know he isn’t alone in holding this backwards, racist belief. That’s how he thinks like everyone else, actually. Well, not everyone thank God, but you know… Most people wouldn’t admit it though. Or maybe it’s so subconscious that they aren’t aware of it. Either way, or whatever, it’s so perverse!!
Manuel Miranda: Latinos are ‘not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else.’
Manuel Miranda, who was busted for hacking into the files of Senate Democrats while he served as an aide to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), is leading the conservative charge against Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. At a Heritage Foundation lunch for conservative bloggers today, Miranda discussed how conservatives could attack Sotomayor’s qualifications without alienating the Latino community. Miranda, who is Latino himself, argued that Latinos had concerns similar to those of “everyone else,” but then appeared to suggest that African-Americans somehow think differently from other people. Latinos are “not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else”:
Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else. When I was on the leader’s staff, someone called me once and asked me: ‘What’s Senator Frist’s Hispanic agenda?’ I said, ‘low taxes, better education, more jobs … what are you talking about?’ And that’s how Hispanics are. This is an opportunity to educate them on all of our issues and they will resonate in the way that they resonate with everyone else.
via http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/02/manuel-miranda-african-americans/
first lady love
I didn’t think it was possible for my Michelle Obama love to increase. I was wrong. I know it’s silly, because it is a known fact, but the fact that she said “biracial” made me really happy. I love the the sentiment of the whole speech….
First Lady Michelle Obama told Washington Math Science Technical (WMST) High School’s graduating class that they are “more than ready” for the challenges ahead and to ignore “the doubters.”
…Mrs. Obama spoke about her own upbringing and her struggle to get to – and then through – the Ivy League amidst “voices of people sowing doubts in my head.” She said that although she was always confident, “there was a part of me that started to believe the doubters.”
…Mrs. Obama talked about other figures who have overcome hardship, including her own husband. “This biracial kid with a funny name from hawaii, of all places,” she laughed, “who was taught that anything is possible.”
http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/ny-bkend0712810377jun01,0,2983687.story
hope vs optimism
excerpts from Prisoners of Hope by Cornel West
Over 30 years after the cowardly murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., black America sits on the brink of collective disaster. Yet most of our fellow citizens deny this black despair, downplay this black rage and blind themselves to the omens in our midst. So now, as in the past, we prisoners of hope in desperate times must try to speak our fallible truths, expose the vicious lies and bear our imperfect witness….
…The country is in deep trouble. We’ve forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. This is true at the personal level. But there’s also a political version, which has to do with what you see when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror and ask yourself whether you are simply wasting your time on the planet or spending it in an enriching manner. We need a moral prophetic minority of all colors who muster the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, and the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, hoping to land on something. That’s the history of black folks in the past and present, and of those of us who value history and struggle. Our courage rests on a deep democratic vision of a better world that lures us and a blood-drenched hope that sustains us.
This hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good. The dominant tendencies of our day are unregulated global capitalism, racial balkanization, social breakdown, and individual depression. Hope enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequality, group xenophobia, and personal despair. Only a new wave of vision, courage, and hope can keep us sane – and preserve the decency and dignity requisite to revitalize our organizational energy for the work to be done. To live is to wrestle with despair yet never to allow despair to have the last word.
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