Education By Example

As a teacher, I have often wondered how best to involve parents in the education of their children.  In my school experience, I’ve often heard that children learn from what we do, as well as what we say.  And a couple of recent experiences in my own home, with my own children, have shown me exactly how important it is to be actively teaching my children, as my parents did for me, by being the type of involved parent in their curricular and extracurricular education: I need to educate them by my example.

A few days ago, in conjunction with the national observance of Columbus Day, my children were exposed to what I felt was a one-sided, celebratory portrayal of Colón. For reasons too numerous to mention here, it was important to me to address the presentation with the person who spoke, and to speak with and teach my own children that evening.  I talked to them both about what was missing from the presentation they witnessed, and about my speaking up and meeting with the presenter.

The lessons I hoped to impart were at least two-fold: first, that Columbus was an explorer who brought knowledge of the new continents back to Europe at a time when they could exploit that information, and then took slavery, disease and oppression back with him on his second journey to colonize in the name of Christianity; second, and more important, is that I taught them how to speak up, even to people who have authority over them, when they believe that something is wrong, or someone is wrong.

I’ve written before about the importance of teaching children that they can change the world only if they speak up, and that they have a moral responsibility to make the world a better place by speaking truth to power when necessary.  As a parent, it’s imperative that I make this lesson clear by acting in the same way I expect them to act.

The second event was a sixth-grade science project which landed (to my surprise) on our dining room table late the night before it was due. Tired as I and my wife both were, we both realized that this was an assignment that our son would need our assistance to complete, a truth that was confirmed by the title of the assignment, “The Family MythBusting Project”.

Knowing nothing about the project (my wife had a little more information that I did), I had to read the directions and help him navigate his academic work. By working with him – running to get supplies, asking him questions to see what he had learned, having him teach me what he knew, letting him stay up a little past his bedtime to finish and staying up with him working – we showed him that his education, that his work was important. While the veracity of Power Balance Bracelets isn’t life-changing (he determined that they don’t really work), the memory and impression of his parents spending the time with him, challenging and learning with him, supporting him as he educated himself will.

I started this blogpost by saying that I am a teacher.  Todos los padres son maestros.  All parents are teachers.  We teach children by our example what is important, what they should focus on, how they should interact with each other and others, and how they impact and affect the world.

If we complain about teachers, but don’t speak to the teachers themselves, then we are teaching them cowardice. If we have issues with their schools, and we take those issues to the schools, we are teaching them to be assertive and have an impact. If we speak Spanish at home but make sure they learn English, we are teaching them to have more tools in their toolbox. By speaking up for bilingual education in schools, for smaller class sizes, for qualified teachers, for equitable distribution of education resources and attention from local and national governments, for Mexican American Studies Departments and Curriculum, for Indigenous People Day and whole host of other issues, we are teaching our children that they have value, that their education has value, and they should raise their voices to secure their birthrights.

When we do that, that is the moment they learn. Es el momento en el cual entienden. We are educating them by example.

Related articles

• Toronto Schools Promote Multicultural Teaching and Learning (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Barack Obama on Education (education.com)

Fear of a [Not White] Planet

Image via Wikipedia

A principal in Massachusetts is being attacked and disparaged because she had the audacity to acknowledge more than a single story. Far from the “e pluribus unum” approach she wants to take toward celebrations of Columbus over Indigenous People Day, or her aversion to celebrating ghouls and goblins instead of  All Hallow’s Eve at school, her detractors have no response or ideas except to simply hurl insults at her womanhood, intellect, citizenship and person.
They fear a not-white planet.
One of the comments on the article even proposes a “Hate White Male Europeans Day”, sarcastically offering that only that group is responsible for any and all advancements in the United States since they first set foot on it some five hundred plus years ago.
Sorry, it is a Not White planet.
Apologies, there is more than one story.
The reality check is that far from being “politically correct” (when did that become an epithet?) this principal is adhering to the most basic of American Ideals – that we are a nation of millions, multitudes of different hues and cultures, but out of the many, we are one.

Related articles

• The Single Story of Christopher Columbus (powerfulbeyondmeasure.wordpress.com)
• All Hallows’ Eve (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)
• Indigenous People’s Day at OccupyMN (redantliberationarmy.wordpress.com)
• Indigenous Peoples’ Day (fulcrumbookblog.com)

It’s the media…the social media, that is.

UPDATE: It seems fitting that this is the post I wrote yesterday, the day before the passing of Steve Jobs. While I avoided the terms iPhone, iPod and iPad, Job’s visionary genius and Apple’s leadership in terms of technology are the foundation and infrastructure upon which these social media tools depend, and are the hardware students are using and will be using for years to come to access the universe we all inhabit. While the company will continue, and his spirit of creativity is no doubt imbued into the philosophy and plans for the future, his creative vision will be missed. Thank you, Steve.

“Social Media” conjures up a variety of thoughts and images: kids hunched over their smartphones in groups, not speaking to each other but laughing about the text they are sharing; teenagers or college students snapping pictures of each other, posed and unposed, and uploading them to Facebook for consumption by that website’s “more than 800 million active users”; people wasting time in front of screens, mobile and desktop, instead of talking to each other or appreciating nature and athletics. All of these pictures portray a negative, narcissistic environment doomed to collapse under the weight of it’s own self-indulgence. But what if they’re wrong?

Mobile computing, social media, smartphones and iPads are toys that adults are turning into tools (or tools masquerading as toys) that have the power to transform education as we know it. Latinos are already the largest ethnic group of users on Twitter and Facebook. Rather than fear this fact, muttering to ourselves in Spanglish about how children are spending too much time playing on their phones, we need to encourage them to put those tools to work, creating a revolution inside the classroom, inside the schools in this country, inside our minds to empower our children.

The power of social media played out earlier this week when thousands of people, Latinos and others, logged in to Ustream to participate in a town hall on the state of education in the Hispanic community with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. What was notable was the immediate access and interaction granted the citizens of the United States via Twitter, allowing real time interaction with the man responsible for shepherding education policy in the United States. We got to ask questions, from the philosophical to the financial, and get some answers. It will play out again when people from across the country gather in Chicago next month for the LATISM National Conference. Imagine if we shared that power to learn and interact with our students.

Teachers are already finding that student success is increasing using technology and social media across the country. It simply takes a shift in thinking to understand that what our kids are using for fun can be used to teach them both the content and skills, that the same apps and sites they’re using to KIT (keep in touch) can be used to create songs, films, podcasts that speak to who they are and share their gifts and talents with a larger world.

In doing this, using new technology and social media to interact with their own education, they will learn that the power to transform the world rests in their hands; the tools they need to impact their school, their neighborhood, their city, their state, their country can be used inside the classroom as well as with their homies.

And there is definitely an app for that.

Originally posted 10/03/11 at Latinos In Social Media for Edu-Wednesday.

Related articles

• Time to Vote for LATISM’s BEST of 2011 (juliorvarela.com)
• Word Cloud: How Social Media Remembered Steve Jobs (socialtimes.com)
• Social media is for telling your Story.. not for distributing your CV !! (mysocialadventures.wordpress.com)

Books Before Pencils

Princesas para mi Princesa.

There were books in my parents’ bedroom. There were books in my parents’ office.  There were books on my nightstand with pictures in them before I could read, and books with words and pictures after I learned.  I learned to speak when Winnie the Pooh asked Christopher Robin for some honey, sounding out the words to make sense of the pictures, or the other way around (I’m not sure). And my parents read to me at night, sending me to sleep with language and pictures that I made up to see what they were reading. The input was more important than the output before I went to school.

Necesitamos poner libros en las manos de todo los ninos Latinos y Americanos y Latino Americanos, también, y temprano mas aun.  Early childhood education begins before children set foot in school, before they pick up a pencil. It is the basis for, and a strong indicator of, academic success as they get older. With “less than half [of Latino children] enrolled in any early learning program” we are sending them into schools un- and underprepared to learn, without the language to articulate their difficulties.  And, on top of this, there are other forces standing directly in their way once they arrive.

In her book, The Latino Education Crisis, Patricia Gándara examines the structural and societal obstacles to educating Latinos in the United States.  From political pogroms like Arizona’s attack on the Tucson Unified School District’s highly successful Mexican American Studies program, to the current vilification of illegal and legal immigrants (read: Latinos) in state legislatures across the country, Latino children’s educations are being thwarted with devastating impact.  “Only about half earn their high school diploma on time; [and] those who do complete high school are only half as likely as their peers to be prepared for college,” and “only 12 percent of Latino students are completing a Bachelor of Arts degree.”

The Obama Administration has begun to address the external obstacles.  The Department of Education and the White House recently coauthored a report “Winning the Future: Improving Education for the Latino Community” which identified not only the status of education amongst Latinos, but also begins to at least articulate changes in the structure of public education to benefit them as well.  And in Tucson, current Latino students are using the oldest method of expression, direct protest, to stop people interested in the demise of Latino education.

Politically, those of us in advanced years, having matriculated from educational institutions or simply left them, need to begin cultivating candidates and politicians, like President Obama, of whatever political affiliation who understand the importance of giving Latino children a Head Start, and making sure that those early childhood education programs are financially accessible.

Most importantly, though, and most immediate, is we need to get them books.  Books with pictures before they can read.  Books with pictures and words after.  Books in English and books in Spanish.  Books before pencils. The input is more important that the output before they go to school. Books.

Cross-posted at Latinos In Social Media for Edu-Wednesdays, May 4th, 2011.

New Latino Majority Creates New Challenges for CA Schools

Improving Latino Education to Win the Future (blog post)

Winning the Future: Improving Education In the Latino Community (report)

The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies

TUSD ethnic studies meeting changed to Tuesday

“Why Don’t More Latinos Graduate?”, LATINA Magazine interview with Patricia Gándara, May 2011, p. 110

The Language of Love

Image via Wikipedia

Todos los padres que yo conozco aman a sus hijos.  Quieren que sus hijos vuelen con alas de oro, hasta vistas y montañas previamente no conocidas. And the best way to do that is bilingual education.  Around the world, children are being educated in multiple languages, opening doors for them that they have yet to imagine.

For immigrant parents in the United States, they most obviously want their young ones to learn English, in order to navigate the majority culture and access the corridors of opportunity, power and success.  For wealthy or economically advantaged parents in these same United States, school visits and decisions often hinge upon which “foreign languages” their child will have exposure to, or the opportunity to learn.

Los Latinos, entonces, debemos aprovechar la oportunidad que tenemos, y demandar educación bilingüe para nuestros hijos. No estoy hablando de “spanglish”. In this instance, we are talking about re-enforcing literacy in the native language of Spanish, and in the language of power, English.  We’re also not speaking of the segregation which has reemerged, in both Arizona and California, that places English Language Learners (predominantly Latinos in both cases), in separate and unequal classrooms where they fall further and further behind until they drop out.

A bilingual education is one that teaches both languages explicitly, and ensures literacy in both. While this may be a challenging notion, the purpose of education is to equip students with the tools necessary to succeed outside of the classroom.  The mental agility necessary to learn both languages is a skill to be developed and practiced at school.  The use of both languages consistently reinforces knowledge that will help them to navigate lives beyond campus. This inclusion and instruction of two languages is the norm in independent schools across the country.

Education in more than one language is a basic tenet of quality education that we need to adopt and demand of all our schools to set Latino children on the path to greater academic and future success. While some parents might be hesitant to confront this issue with the school administrators, it is imperative que nuestros padres step up and speak up.  Bilingualism isn’t simply a benefit to be reserved to students fortunate enough to attend elite educational institutions.  Being able to communicate in more than one language is becoming a gateway skill for success in the twenty-first century.

Standing up for our children and their learning, though, does teach them yet another language. Que mantengan el idioma de su familia, de su hogar, y que aprendan el idioma del poder en Los Estados Unidos es un mensaje en el idioma mas universal del mundo: el idioma del amor.

This entry was originally posted on Wednesday, 6 April 2011 at Latinos in Social Media for Edu-Wednesday.

Related Articles

• Language News: Dual language program gives Modesto kids best of English, Spanish – Education – Modbee.com (lingeducator.com)
• Education: Battle Over Bilingualism (time.com)
• Education: For Learning Or Ethnic Pride? (time.com)
• Getting Into College: The Personal Statement (education.com)
• Benefits of Bilingualism
• Break down the language barriers.
• Bilingual Children Are Better Mentally Developed And Do Better In School
• Studies question Arizona’s policy on English learners
• Separate and Unequal Schools Pervasive in Southern California
• The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles
• Bilingual Minds

It’s A-Parent

Being a middle school teacher for fifteen years, its been very easy for me to dismiss the anxieties parents feel about the pressures and tensions of guiding their children through daily struggles, determining which are the big deals and which are bumps in the road. I don’t mean to say that their nervousness about a bad grade or shelling out money for test preparation was irrelevant. I do mean to say that I (wrongly) ascribed their actions to a certain weakness that I now find within myself.

As I write this, my daughter is sitting for the first standardized test that has any consequence in her young life. Intellectually, I know that it is just another hoop through which she has to jump to access the most nurturing possible academic environment available to her family. Intellectually, I am aware that her Latina surname, her African American lineage, and her recent trip to visit familia in Chile are all plusses in her evaluation column. Intellectually, I know that this test is designed to measure her knowledge, her thinking process and her capacity for learning.

I’m her Daddy. None of that matters.

When I corrected her practice test, I marked correct answers and marveled at her intuitive grasp of patterns, and her mathematical ability. “She’s got a little of my math skills!” Then, reading the answer key, I found those same answers to be wrong. Rereading the questions left me frustrated and began to gnaw a pit in my stomach.  The questions were tricks! They weren’t assessing her knowledge, they were designed to weed out kids who don’t know the loopholes! Am I setting her up for failure?

All those moments of quite consolation with parents of my students played like a slideshow in my brain… reassurances that their children (that my child) is a smart kid, is a capable human being, has to face these hurdles, these obstacles, these tricks and tests on their own, because that’s how they grow up …all of those moments I’d been able, because I loved their children without the ego attachment that they wear my face as they walk through the world, to provide a little perspective, a little comfort, a little reassurance, came back to me when I needed them.

And so I took a deep breath. I drove her an hour in sprinkling rain. I told her to 1) read each question, 2) take her time, and 3) check her answers. And then I sent her in. When she gets done in an hour, she wants to go to Subway for lunch. That’s her biggest concern. (Well, that and whether she can get an iPod Shuffle because it’s easier to use when she goes walking or running on a treadmill.)

And I’m gonna keep teaching her how, and letting her jump the hurdles on her own, hard as that is.  Because her growing up strong, confident and independent are my concern.  Even if it scares me sometimes.

My Parents Are Teachers

Nine years old and college-bound

Lately, this blog and my voice have been getting some airtime and attention.  After years of working and learning, of writing and speaking, I accept those because they feel like acknowledgement of hours spent hunched over a notebook, hands stained in ink, mind churning as I analyze the history of this country, and the relationships and roles my peoples play in building that history each day.
But, in that attention, I need to admit that I haven’t done this on my own.  I need to admit that I have stood on the shoulders of giants, and taken the next step.  When I was nine years old, my grandmother, then going back to school to complete the college degree that had been interrupted by marriage, World War II, and raising four black women during the Civil Rights Movement, asked me if I was going to college.  Being the precocious (or obnoxious) child that I was, I simply answered,

“You’ve met my parents.  Like I have a choice!”

My mother and father made clear, not by telling me but by showing me with the stories of their lives and the actions I witnessed, that my education was important.
Since I began kindergarten there has not been a parent-teacher meeting, a Christmas play, a championship soccer game (maybe not championship,but…) that they didn’t change their schedules to support.

1985 never looked so good!

They also showed me, by their vocations, how important education is.  My father moved our entire family across the country as he earned his PhD at Georgetown, investigating and teaching the best methods of learning for students whose primary language isn’t English.  From the Montessori classroom to the US Department of Education, my mother has kept her hands on the pulse of learning her entire adult life.  I say these things, not as braggadocio, but echoing the awe that others speak with when meeting them.
They’ve always been my mom and dad, and I’ve always known that education was important because they showed me that it was. They watched the morning news and talked about it with me, even when I wanted to watch The Justice League, even when I didn’t understand what they were talking about. Now a husband and father, I’m doing these same things for my children because that’s how I learned, and that’s how I’ve become successful.
As I watch Arizona attempting to kidnap the future in this country; as I watch the Teachers in Wisconsin being vilified rather than lauded; as I watch public education being turned into assembly lines for manual labor, I have to stand up and say My Parents Are Teachers.  I have to stand up and say that it isn’t the American way to cheat children of their futures, and to keep families ignorant and afraid.  I have to stand up and say THANK YOU to my parents, for teaching so many years in the classroom, and teaching me out of the classroom when to stand up. From my work with Latinos in Social Media to my support for the public workers in Wisconsin, the lessons that I’ve learned, that my parents live, resonate each day.  This seems like a good moment for me to give thanks.

Thank You, Mom.  Thank you, Papi.

From UCLA to the President’s Advisory Board for the National Institute of Literacy, Thank You.
From the University of Redlands to the United States Department of Education, Thank You.
From Olin Street to Almansor Street, Thank You.
Your examples continue to inspire me, and to show me how important learning and education are.  And so I’ll continue doing my best to Spread the Word.
As I continue fighting Arizona, fighting Wisconsin, fighting ignorance and oppression across the country and the globe, I have to say thank you for arming me with the tools, the desire, and the knowledge to do so.

My parents are teachers.  And they’ve taught me quite a bit.

La Familia Macias in 2011.

 

Epilogue: This post was catalyzed by Univision’s Es El Mometo initiative, which began because too many Latino students in the United States don’t have the blessing of parents who know how the education system works, or have walked through it themselves.  The matriculation rates for Latinos are far below other ethnic groups in this country.  One way we can improve this fact is greater parent involvement, and greater awareness on the part of families of the requirements for students to graduate and go to college. As my parents have been involved in my education, we need to educate, inform and get parents and caretakers actively involved.

Related Articles

• Outlawing Chicanos: An Alien Education (blog.latism.org)
• Univision’s Es El Momento Program for Education (amoxcalli.ginaruiz.com)

Stoopid is as stoopid does

Fear and hatred of “the other” has reached ridiculous levels.  The President of the United States is going to speak to school children, and white “conservative” ignorant people are keeping their kids home from school, or bombarding their school administrations with fictitious objections to stop “the socialist indoctrination” from happening.

Did they protest President George H.W. Bush when he spoke to kids and asked them to “help the President”?  No.

Did they protest when President Ronald Reagan spoke to children, and gave his misguided “trickle-down economics” theory in answer to a question?  No.

But the “black fascist socialist hitler” is doing something wrong, right?

More and more, as the untruths are piled on top of each other like corpses in front of outnumbered and scared invaders beating a slow and forced retreat, I am unnerved by the inability of rational people, conservatives, liberals and progressives alike, to stem the tide.  This latest objection against the President speaking to schoolchildren and encouraging them to do well in school is merely another straw (although the camel’s back is noticeably strained).  On top of the birthers, the deathers, the death panels, “Obamacare”, the bailout of the banks (which was President Bush, but what are facts?), the negotiations with terrorists (I mean the diplomacy with Iran), the failure of the war in Afghanistan (that President Bush began and forgot), the stimulus package which is saving the deregulated orgy that was wall street, and the reform of the for-profit health insurance industry into an actual health-care industry, the white people who wanted John McCain to be president are proving to be sore losers.

They’re showing up to public discussion with arms, misunderstanding both the first and second amendments to the Constitution.  They’re arguing the primacy of the tenth amendment, or the Reserve Clause, and stating the federal government doesn’t have the power to legislate to the states.  They’re abusing the very rights they “cherish” because they lost to a black man, who’s aiming to keep the promises he made when he was campaigning.

I’ve said before I hate stupid people.  But that hate is beginning to eat me up.  So I’m working on understanding that Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are simply expressing a different point of view based on insecurity and challenges to white male domination of this country that they are unable to fathom.  I’m working on being more like Senator Franken who is able to address people who disagree without displaying the frustration at their idiocy and unfounded accusations that I’m simply unable to do at this point.

Keeping your kids home so that they won’t hear the President say go to school and do your work so you can grow up and be big and strong and successful is stoopid.  And I don’t hate the parents for being stoopid.

I just feel sorry for their children.

Text of President Obama’s Address

Planned Obama Speech to Students Sparks Protest

Obama’s education speech no cause for debate

My Cup of Tea

I teach seventh and eighth graders. I asked my students what they thought the purpose of our class is . . .  this is what I got:

“ We are here not only to learn about others’ stories, but also [to learn] how to write our own.”

Education is the key to empowerment – that’s why slave owners in the South forbade literacy among slaves; that’s why the Taliban forbade the educating of girls; that’s why I am a teacher of his- and her-story.  Access to information coupled with expectations of success and responsibility to succeed both allow and motivate children to improve themselves and the world we live in.

Greg Mortenson understands this necessity, too, though he’s too old for my class.  He is writing the stories of thousands of boys and girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan, an area of the world that we as Americans only pay irritated attention to when we pay attention at all.  Better said, he is helping them to write their own stories.

His book, Three Cups of Tea, should be the next book you read. Period.

Those of us fortunate enough to have internet access, to learn our letters indoors, to be taught, and who can conceive of a world beyond our immediate dwelling because we’ve been shown that it is here have a responsibility to make those gifts a reality for each person on this earth.  It is our responsibility to lift up our fellows, to insure that none of us lives in squalor, in poverty, in ignorance.

“From those to whom much has been given, much is expected.”

“Dr. Greg” is giving life to that message, is giving a foundation and walls and roofs to those words.  The translation of that spirit into physical acts is usually where human beings fall short.  The words are said, but the body doesn’t move to make them incarnate.  Greg Mortenson is making them real.

There are many people I look to for inspiration – Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama.

I’ve just added one more, because Greg Mortenson and his mission are my cup of tea.

From the Back of the Bus

Roland Burris is now the junior Senator from the state of Illinois.  For better or for worse, that’s what the Illinois Supreme Court and House of Representatives and Governor (and former junior Senator) have orchestrated in the last few weeks since the CHANGE was made real.  That’s not what this post is about, though.

In the jim crow era, segregation was the law of the land in the south, and the law of life in the north.  Black people and white people did not congregate in the same locations, with few exceptions.  And poll taxes, literacy tests, and other impediments were used to insure that the franchise was exclusive property.  The problem with this as a democratic political entity, though, is that it meant there were no black people in the halls of Congress, on the Supreme Court, or in the White House (unless they were serving dinner, or driving carriages).

In the last two weeks, we’ve seen the only black Senator resign his seat, to be filled with the only black Senator currently in the United States Senate.  That’s one percent.  That percentage indicates failure to me, both on the part of the dominant community, and on black folk.

Much is taken for granted in the MSM – that because President-elect Obama is black, systemic racism has been eradicated.  This is an absolute falsehood.  And despite Congressman Rush’s inappropriate language and assertions when Senator Burris was appointed, the nerves that he was dancing on were still raw because the underlying question is valid:

Are black folk still at the back of the bus?

My great grandmother was the daughter of a slave.  My maternal grandparents were born in the segregated South before the Great Depression (the first one, that is.)  My mother and father found each other while watching people their own age be beaten, murdered, lynched, sprayed, and while they were putting themselves in harm’s way for justice’s sake.  I do take much for granted, that I can do whatever I want to do in this country and this world, regardless of the color of my skin.  My children will be even more free, watching a black man take the oath of office before they hit the third and fourth grades.

But what of the young man “accidentally” shot by an Oakland police officer ringing in the new year?  Update:  The police officer has been charged with murder. What of the staggering number of black and brown youth failing out, dropping out, being pushed out of schools – from elementary through secondary and at the university level?  Why is the struggle to find positive black role models off the field of play so difficult?  Why do black people with an education lack authenticity in the public perception?  Why is learning considered acting white?

And before the critics and the naysayers begin to howl, riddle me this, Batman – why was there considerable conversation, inside the black community with chagrin and outside the black community with relief, that Barack wasn’t “really black” or “black enough”?

Because we are still at the back of the bus.

We are voluntarily paying our fare, getting off, and reentering through the back door.  For the second generation of integrated education, we have fallen off considerably. And there is a growing divide between the talented tenth and the rest.  Ernest Green succeeded because he had to deal with the reality of Central High School.  His education was valuable to him.  As it was and is to Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Colin Powell,Condoleeza Rice, Susan Rice and a host of others who grew up without the guarantee or assumption that they were going to be given anything for free, let alone an education.

This partial observation (there are many threads leading in and out of this train of thought) evokes a variety of questions, but chief among them are two:  Who is responsible for this status?  What can we do about it?

Different people are asking these questions in different ways in light of President-elect Obama’s victory in November, and his impending inauguration eleven days from now.  And other communities are asking the question for themselves as well.  Arianna Huffington asked it a few days ago on the HuffPost.  Bill Cosby will be on Meet the Press Sunday morning asking it.  And more than a few of us are asking it, answering it, and sharing our answers with the world.

I started this post with an observation that there is only one black Senator in a group of one hundred elected Senators representing the United States of America.  That’s one percent.  Literally.  Since more than one out of every hundred people is black in this country, I think there’s a problem with that, both on the country’s part, and on black folk.  The question is:

When are we going to move to the front of the bus?

Slaves helped build White House

Burris appointment valid, Illinois high court says

Obama isn’t the only one being inaugurated on January 20th

Congressman sleeps on cot to save cash

High Court to decide key voting rights challenge

Blu Phi!  You Know!

Powell endorses Obama service initiative

Little Rock Nine set foundation for Obama, students say

Ex-officer charged with murder in BART shooting