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Baring My Soul
By Stacey Tolbert
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Kool
Aid
When I was a bra-less,
fearless, tree-climbing girl-child, every other child I knew who
liked Kool-Aid always wanted the red Kool-Aid. It's not that we
didn't like the other flavors, its just that red was the best.
The one. The most sought after. The ultimate. When asked,
"What flavor?" no child ever actually named the
flavor, just the color. In our subliminal, we were giving it
personality. It was vibrant. Passionate. And let's not forget
sweet. The amount of sugar had to be just right, though.
Too much sugar, the amount
that makes your mouth pucker and lips smack and your taste buds
cringe, would ruin it.
Our mothers and
grandmothers and "aunties" knew exactly how to make
that red Kool-Aid; they taught us how to make it and it was
"good."
No one can deny the
strength, resilience and self-determination of Black Women.
It’s what makes us the BOMB and its what makes us the BALM.
I relate this
"essence" to the careful balance of ingredients in
that perfect batch of red Kool Aid.
However, somewhere between
ages 8 and 35, Black women lose the ability to make "good
red Kool-Aid." We add entirely too much "sugar"
to take away the bitterness in our lives to restore in us some
sense of what we come to lack, such as faith in a higher power,
assertiveness, the time and space to listen to our still small
voices and self-love, the love that makes us want to pamper
ourselves and enjoy the unique inner and outer beauty that we
were given. We try to sugar-coat reality with bad love choices,
misinformation about ourselves, stereotypes, promiscuity, and
allowing abuse to control and ultimately destroy our lives.
Over time, we actually
forget how to create that perfect balance of ingredients. We
forget what elements make for a happy, healthy existence. We
forget how to make the "good ole fashioned," sweet,
simple red Kool-Aid. We stop making life sweet and simple. We
stop making it. We stop. And our daughters and nieces grow up
wanting a mere skewed, bitter imitation of what used to be. It's
time to remember ladies (and gentlemen) to return to the basics.
To "refill" our cups with the good things that have
been taken away from us and replenish our empty vessels with
those once healthy things we've willingly given away. . . . Make
yourself stop, put your feet up and enjoy a mental glass of
Kool-Aid.
Anastacia Tolbert
Table
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Predator Nation
Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
By Charles H. Ferguson
If you’re smart and a hard worker, but your parents aren’t rich, you’re now better off being born in Munich, Germany or in Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New York. This radical shift did not happen by accident. Ferguson shows how, since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, both major political parties have become captives of the moneyed elite. It was the Clinton administration that dismantled the regulatory controls that protected the average citizen from avaricious financiers. It was the Bush team that destroyed the federal revenue base with its grotesquely skewed tax cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama White House that has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed “reforms” installed after the collapse of 2008.
Predator Nation reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers became mere courtiers to the elite. |
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Based on many newly released court filings, it details the
extent of the crimes—there is no other word—committed in the
frenzied chase for wealth that caused the financial crisis.
And, finally, it lays out a plan of action for how we might take back our country and the American dream.—Read Chapter 1
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. |
"Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. |
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She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story
of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
By Eric Liu and Nick Hanaper
American democracy is informed by the 18th century’s most cutting edge thinking on society, economics, and government. We’ve learned some things in the intervening 230 years about self interest, social behaviors, and how the world works. Now, authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that some fundamental assumptions about citizenship, society, economics, and government need updating. For many years the dominant metaphor for understanding markets and government has been the machine. Liu and Hanauer view democracy not as a machine, but as a garden. A successful garden functions according to the inexorable tendencies of nature, but it also requires goals, regular tending, and an understanding of connected ecosystems. The latest ideas from science, social science, and economics—the cutting-edge ideas of today—generate these simple but revolutionary ideas: The economy is not an efficient machine. |
It’s an effective garden that need tending. Freedom
is responsibility. Government should be about the
big what and the little how. True self interest is
mutual interest. We’re all better off when we’re all
better off. The model of citizenship depends on
contagious behavior, hence positive behavior begets positive behavior.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 7 July 2012
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