It’s a good thing that Gabourey Sidibe is comfortable in her own skin because there are plenty of people out there looking to rip her to shreds due to her obesity. In November the Hollywood new-comer spoke to Oprah about her appearance and her decision to accept and love herself despite how the outside world reacts to her.

It’s safe to say that she was forced to embrace herself out of necessity due to cruel comments like the ones made earlier this week by talk show host Howard Stern and co-host Robin Quivers as they lambasted Sidibe for her weight, and Oprah Winfrey for ‘daring’ to suggest that the young actress has a bright future in Hollywood.

Although Howard and crew were as obnoxious, ignorant and unnecessary as usual, their insults were probably a drop in the bucket compared to what Sidibe has heard throughout her entire life. Hopefully she will continue to disregard the irrelevant views of others and focus on loving herself and nurturing her theatrical talent. After all, it’s that approach that has gotten her where she is today; who knows where it will take her tomorrow.

Study: More minority babies likely to be born in US
Minorities make up nearly half the children born in the U.S., part of a historic trend in which minorities are expected to become the U.S. majority over the next 40 years. In fact, demographers say this year could be the “tipping point” when the number of babies born to minorities outnumbers that of babies born to whites. The numbers are growing because immigration to the U.S. has boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years. Minorities made up 48 percent of U.S. children born in 2008, the latest census estimates available, compared to 37 percent in 1990. “Census projections suggest America may become a minority-majority country by the middle of the century. For America’s children, the future is now,” said Kenneth Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire who researched many of the racial trends in a paper being released Wednesday. (Continue Reading…)

Mandela let South African Blacks down, ex-wife says
Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife has bitterly criticized the 92-year-old anti-apartheid icon as having “let us down,” prompting outrage Wednesday in South Africa. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said she could not forgive him for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 alongside F.W. De Klerk, according to Tuesday’s Evening Standard, a British newspaper. The white president released Mandela and went on to participate in negotiations that ended apartheid. “He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside. The economy is very much ‘white.’ It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded,” Madikizela-Mandela was quoted as saying. (Continue Reading…)

Poll: African Americans need less time to sleep
Florida state lawmakers want to ban public display of noose
Red Cross: Zimbabwe back to brink of food crisis
Wife of Rep. John Conyers sentenced to jail
Black Caucus to meet with Obama about jobs
Allegations of police brutality in NYPD-Yonkers dispute

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Article from The Grio

This time, a 20-year-old student at Georgia College & State University accused Roethlisberger of assaulting her in the bathroom at Capital City nightclub early Friday morning in Milledgeville, Ga. Roethlisberger has hired attorney Ed Garland, who represented Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis during his murder case in 2000 and rapper T.I. on federal weapon charges, who claims the 28-year-old 2-time Super Bowl champion is innocent.

Last July, Andrea McNulty filed a civil suit against Roethlisberger stemming from an incident during a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Calif. Prosecutors didn’t file any criminal charges and the Nevada Supreme Court is still deciding where the case should be tried.

Roethlisberger, a white athlete, is innocent until proven guilty, but for black athletes, rapper Jay-Z said it best: Guilty until proven innocent.

Too often black stars on the level of Roethlisberger aren’t given the benefit of the doubt by the media, fans and the leagues when they run into their own legal troubles.

ESPN completely ignored Roethlisberger’s civil lawsuit as it never happened but it covered a similar lawsuit charged against Los Angeles Lakers guard Shannon Brown during last year’s NBA Playoffs.

In the case of quarterback Michael Vick, who was indeed guilty of a federal dogfighting conspiracy charge, he’s still being haunted by his actions after serving 18 months in federal prison.

There are several NFL teams that are in need of a quarterback who won’t take a chance on Vick based on his 2007 conviction. You couldn’t find one general manager that wouldn’t trade for Roethlisberger if he were available.

Could you imagine the reaction if this were Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who it seems like he’s criticized for the way he puts on his helmet, instead of Roethlisberger?

And we won’t even get started with the reaction around Tiger Woods and his transgressions, which is not against the law the last I checked. The one thing you can say about Woods is all of his alleged affairs were consensual in nature.

Roger Goodell has spent the majority of his three-and-a-half years as NFL commissioner cleaning up the league’s image, dropping the hammer on players who found themselves in trouble with the law. After Goodell suspended cornerback Adam “Pacman” Jones for the entire season and the late Chris Henry for eight games in 2007 for multiple arrests, the commissioner released a statement saying, “We must protect the integrity of the NFL. The highest standards of conduct must be met by everyone in the NFL because it is a privilege to represent the NFL, not a right. These players, and all members of our league, have to make the right choices and decisions in their conduct on a consistent basis.”

Even if Roethlisberger is cleared of all charges, he has damaged the integrity of the NFL and Goodell should act accordingly. The NFL front office has to be cringing at the fact that a two-time Super Bowl champion and the face of the league’s most historic franchise is a household name of the TMZ.com audience.

How many chances is Roethlisberger entitled to because of his skin color? Nobody wants to say the “r-word” in the politically correct world we live in today, but who are we kidding – race is a factor.

(Continue Reading @ The Grio…)

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Article from BlackVoices.com

“How you doin’, sweetheart,” I said as I smiled my winning party smile and extended my hand to shake hers in a gentlemanly way

Her response: “How you doin’, what?”

I repeated: “How you doin’ sweetheart?

Her response (this time with her lips parsed and her nose turned up): “How you doin’, what?”

By this point, the soft grasp I had of her hand became a clawing Kimbo Slice-style grip she had conjured to show that she resented the way I made my introduction. After repeating the futile exchange once more just to see if this woman was for real, I dropped it, refusing to apologize for being friendly at a social function.

But I did get her point: Shaking her hand softly and calling her “sweetheart” was apparently an attempt to turn back years of women’s lib, and I needed to be tarred and feathered – sexist pig that I was.

Looking back, I’m sure that if I ran in to her now, “sweetheart” would probably not be on the list of things I’d call her.

Still, as I read through the pages of Cleveland-based journalist and The Root commentator Jimi Izrael’s new book “The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find Good Black Men,” I couldn’t help but think of this and other incidents, where I had to be the bad black guy for being at the wrong place at the right time around the wrong sista.

Full disclosure: Jimi and I have been friends for years, so to avoid conflicts of interests, this won’t be a review of his book, but I will analyze the premise of the book, which is basically as follows:

Black women have such a hard time finding compatible mates in black men because of a pop culture–created, unattainable standard that no man could ever grasp. The man they want is handsome, rich, powerful, gallant, confident, while at the same time docile, compliant, perpetually agreeable, and automotonic.

Izrael spends chapters on his own observations of black women — including his mother, his two failed marriages, Essence magazine, Oprah Winfrey, Iyanla Vanzant, Terri McMillan (you mean it wasn’t freakin’ obvious?) and several female archetypes that a guy might run across in his dating life. But his prose is a bit too general for me and he broadbrushes sistas with one stroke, as if it’s that easy to sum up black women.

Most people reading the book would feel Izrael’s bitterness over how some of his relationships have gone, and he is known for debates in which his notions are challenged as sexist and disrespectful. Honestly I’d love to see him in the hotseat on a cable network with whichever sista he’s pissed off this week. Stuff like this makes great television.

But with that said, you can’t really take the treatise that seriously. It’s basically what guys talk about in barbershops and locker rooms. And yes, it is funny. I found myself laughing out loud a few times on the subway not only about his candor, but that he made me think of more than a few of my own ex-girlfriends.

Now Izrael does get personal in the book and is open about his relationship successes and failures, but he also gets kinda TMI, and there are things I could have lived without knowing. What’s missing is the view from the other side: he puts his ex-wives’ cruelty on front street, but I’m curious to hear their side of the story. Hmm….

He also made some salient points about hyperfeminism, such as the kind I encountered from “sweetheart” above. He’s not the only dude to be sick of being the bad black guy just because someone feels subjugated by their boss or had a rotten experience with an ex-boyfriend. If I’m not the one who cheated on you with your college roommate, then I shouldn’t be the scapegoat.

But for the record, I do disagree with him on feminism as a whole. Izrael argues that feminism is a source of the problems between black men and women. Nonsense. Feminism got women the right to vote, won educational opportunities for girls where there had been none, Title IX for example. It also opened doors in the workplace and ensured that women would have recourse in cases of sexual harassment. Around the world, feminists are fighting against atrocities, such as female genital mutilation and protecting children from forced marriages.

Izrael’s actual point is that somewhere along the line in our community, real and effective feminism somehow got watered down to a victimization chorus that way too many people joined and it ultimately alienated black men. On this, I can see where he’s going.

There is a huge industry of books, DVDs, radio shows and all types of media dedicated to so-called “self-help” and “healing,” but it really does nothing but sell perpetual victimhood. Not that there isn’t some good stuff out there, because there is. But where you’ve got smart people who tell you that you can break free from a bad relationship, or even abuse, come out an empowered survivor and actually help other people, there are twice as many soundbyte pimps who write what they write just to make an “Oprah” appearance and make millions.

That is symptomatic of a society where it is far more valuable to have a problem than to solve one.

Still I disagree with the considerable length of time he takes to blame black women for out-of-wedlock children or the proliferation of ghettos. Conceivably yes, communities filled with fatherless children, who depend on government subsidy and have little to no economy other than a black market and no real leadership can create a ghetto of cyclically perpetual poverty. I get it, I see it all the time.

But ghettos aren’t new. They existed long before the so-called 70 percent out of wedlock black birth rate (which, by the way, is loaded bullsh*t. I debunked that in a post last year.)

When Izrael blames sistas for why the “hood is so bad,” he fails to talk about discrimination, economic divestment, redlining, gerrymandering, police corruption, educational inequality, poor public and social services, inadequate health care, crooked politicians and dirty preachers. I’m willing to bet that’s got something to do with it too, Jimi.

The “Denzel Principle” did make me ask one question, though. At what point did black men and women declare war on each other? Where is it written that we’re supposed to be natural enemies, always in predatory mode? When did the blame game start, and is one group supposed to pay reparation to the other? Who would be the judge in our civil trial?

Listen, the whole “conflict” between black men and women is contrived garbage that doesn’t do anything for us or our children. The fact is, we need each other. Both black men and women are responsible for the progress we’ve made in this country so far. I mean damn…do you really think Barack and Michelle could be where they are without leaning on each other while being responsible with their relationship? Not saying they’re the perfect couple, but there’s something to learn there.

(Continue Reading @ Black Voices…)

Black Barbie sold for less than White Barbie at Walmart
Walmart is raising eyebrows after cutting the price of a black Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll’s white counterpart at one store and possibly others. A photo first posted to the humor Web site FunnyJunk.com and later to the Latino Web site Guanabee.com shows packages of Mattel’s Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Theresa dolls hanging side by side at an unidentified store. The Theresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are marked as being on sale at $3.00. The Barbies to the right of the Theresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The dolls look identical aside from their color. (Continue Reading…)

FBI shuts down civil rights era investigations
With little fanfare, the FBI announced in an article in the Washington Post last week that it was closing its investigations into all but a handful of unsolved civil rights era murders. The head of the FBI team assigned to investigate these cold cases stated that “there’s maybe five to seven cases where we don’t know who did it. For every other case, we got it.” This announcement came as a surprise to activists who have pushed the FBI and the Justice Department to re-open and fully investigate many of these cases. It is also a blow to the families of murdered blacks from that era, who have been the primary force pushing federal law enforcement officials to fully investigate and unearth the truth of what happened to their loved ones. (Continue Reading…)

Christians flee after Nigeria’s massacre
Ed Gordon returns to BET News
NAACP calling for the resignation of school board chair
Report: Nearly half of Black women have herpes
East Africa new frontier for oil exploration

Yes, I was stunned to hear these words. But then again, perhaps Delay has decided to officially marginalize himself and say all the things he wanted to say when he actually had a position of relevance within the federal government. Instead, he has allowed us to peek in to the minds of his colleagues, who are probably thinking the same way. Here are Delay’s words based on his interview with Candy Crowley:

You know,” Delay said, “there is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs. In fact, there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don’t look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out.”

Host Candy Crowley: Congressman, that’s a hard sell, isn’t it?

Tom Delay: It’s the truth.

Crowley: People are unemployed because they want to be?

Delay: Well, it is the truth and people in the real world know it. And they have friends and they know it. Sure, we ought to be helping people that are unemployed find a job, but we also have budget considerations that are incredibly important, especially now that Obama is spending monies that we don’t have.

(Continue Reading @ Black Voices….)

When do Black women get positive roles?
Whenever I want to make sure I don’t spend the evening alone, I make jambalaya. I make a darn good pot of jambalaya. Nearly 20 years ago, I picked up a cookbook in New Orleans and I’ve been cooking cajun every since. So when the No. 2 son was in town visiting his brother, I knew the only way I was guaranteed to see them both was to stir up the jambalaya. Besides, Sunday night was Oscar night. The award program has always been a guilty pleasure. Growing up, I was like other girls across America. I fantasized about being up on that stage, clutching that gold-plated statue and giving an emotional acceptance speech. (Continue Reading…)

African American unemployment rate shrinks to 15.8%
The unemployment rate among African Americans improved slightly in February, shrinking from 16.5% to 15.8% for the month, according to Labor Department statistics released Friday. In contrast, the overall jobless rate remained steady at 9.7%. Despite the contraction of the African American jobless rate, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis says there is still much work to be done. “There is an extremely high number of unemployment in the African American community,” she said. “We want to work with Congress to make sure that more money is available to programs such as Pathways Out of Poverty, which targets high unemployment areas through unique job training opportunities such as retrofitting or weatherizing.” (Continue Reading…)