Soul Satisfying Books and The Black Russian Video

Frederick Thomas, Moscow 1912

Publicity photograph, giving his name in Old Orthography Russian, as "F. F. Tomas"; published on the eve of his opening Maxim, Moscow's premiere nightclub, one of the successful businesses the Black Russian millionaire owned.
Frederick Thomas is identified by his Russian name,

“Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas."

 
This is for all of you loving world travel. We can't always roam the planet like we'd to, but we can certainly use great literature to experience the far-off and exotic, all from the comforts of home.


Recently I've been reading books by authors from other lands and authors telling stories about far off places. What a fresh perspective that's been. These books have been about stories both true and non-fictional, but all thoroughly researched so that the scenarios unfold within accurate historical contexts. 

On my armchair journeys, I've gained insight into the Caucasus regions, Eastern Russia and Moscow from before the killing of the Czar to the Bolshevik revolution and WW2; the society and mindset of a white English merchant that had a slave ship built so he could get into 'The Trade'; France, her politics and society spanning two decades before, during the Revolution and on into the reign of Napoleon; the social demography of contemporary Pakistan; the exotic multicultural world of Constantinople/Istanbul, Azerbaijan; and the ideological and social transitions of France and Germany pre-WW1 and on into WW2.

Besides the joy of deeper learning, the gift of this type of reading is how it impacts that part of me that pays close attention to today's world as a political scientist that's focused on international relations. It's all about understanding 'Why people act the way they do?!?'

What I'm receiving delivers meaning to the events and actions on today's world stage. This knowledge is allowing me to understand and clearly trace the roots of today's conflicts. To deepen one's understanding of history through the eyes of different cultures and people is profound. America is in the trouble she is today, because she understands nothing of the underlying history, relationships, conflicts and culture of these far-flung regions that are now commanding her attention.

I've got treats for you below, because I've been running across some great new titles that are really worth your time. What's been delightful and personally inspiring, is that all of these stories are intertwined with people of the Black Diaspora. They've shown me how my own people have popped up in the most unexpected places at critical moments of humanity's history to play major roles.


Here's the link to watch the a great BookTV program I caught 2 weeks ago. Author and Yale professor Vladimir Alexandrov has done incredible research and tells the story of The Black Russian, a brother named Frederick Bruce Thomas born in 1872 in Coahoma, Mississippi. Truly an awesome story about a Black man from Mississippi and his quest to live true to his full potential...wherever that took him. Really inspiring story. I'd love to hear what you think after viewing. The author's responses in the Q & A after are also not to be missed.

http://www.booktv.org/Watch/14417/The+Black+Russian.aspx


And here's the link to a recent Ta-Nishi Coates piece from the Atlantic Magazine, "What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct'"
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/


I'm also telling folks about The Black Count by Tom Reiss, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in April for Biography. It's a great read!


The Black Count

Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

By: Tom Reiss

By the author of the internationally bestselling biography The Orientalist, The Black Count brings to life one of history’s great forgotten heroes: a man almost unknown today yet with a personal story that is strikingly familiar. His swashbuckling exploits appear in The Three Musketeers, and his triumphs and ultimate tragic fate inspired The Count of Monte Cristo . His name is Alex Dumas. Father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, Alex has become, through his son's books, the model for a captivating modern protagonist: the wronged man in search of justice.

Born to a black slave mother and a fugitive white French nobleman in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but then made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy.

He was only 32 when he was given command of 53,000 men, the reward for series of triumphs that many regarded as impossible, and then topped his previous feats by leading a raid up a frozen cliff face that secured the Alps for France. It was after his subsequent heroic service as Napoleon’s cavalry commander that Dumas was captured and cast into a dungeon–and a harrowing ordeal commenced that inspired one of the world’s classic works of fiction.

The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son. Drawing on hitherto unknown documents, letters, battlefield reports and Dumas' handwritten prison diary, The Black Count is a groundbreaking masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.

-- from the publisher

Checking the Pulitzer website, I also noticed another book that might be interesting about the great litigator and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

"The Pulitzer Prize was also awarded to "Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America," by Gilbert King (Harper), a richly detailed chronicle of racial injustice in the Florida town of Groveland in 1949, involving four black men falsely accused of rape and drawing a civil rights crusader, and eventual Supreme Court justice, into the legal battle."

So you can see~ don't ever underestimate our life stories, accomplishments and exploits. Consensus says they make award winning, highly fascinating reading. If these titles sound interesting to you, let me encourage you to order these books from Esowan Books in Los Angeles, or Marcus Books, Oakland or San Francisco!

lovu,

Kentke

Ella Fitzgerald's 96th Birthday

HAPPY   BIRTHDAY  BELOVED  ELLA

Ella Fitzgerald and adoring fan Marilyn Monroe

(April 25, 1917 - June 15, 1996)

Ella Fitzgerald, known as the "First Lady of Song" and "Lady Ella," was an American jazz and song vocalist who interpreted much of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of her 59-year recording career, she sold 40 million copies of her 70-plus albums, won 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and thePresidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.


Ella Fitzgerald was not allowed to play at Mocambo because of her race. Then, one of Ella's biggest fans made a telephone call that quite possibly changed the path of her career for good. Here, Ella tells the story of how Marilyn Monroe changed her life:


"I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt ... she personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him - and it was true, due to Marilyn's superstar status - that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman - a little ahead of her times. And she didn't know it."

On March 15, 1955, Ella Fitzgerald opened her initial engagement at the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood.

Knowing The Truth that Sets You Free

Surveying Emancipation

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From the New York Times Opinionator Blog
March 18, 2013, 1:58 pm 9 Comments

Disunion

By RICK BEARD

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Tags:
Blacks, Civil War (US) (1861-65), Lincoln, Abraham, Reconstruction Era, Slavery



President Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 lent new urgency to the question of “what shall we do with the Negroes.” What had been only a possibility a few months before — the freeing of more than 3 million slaves still behind Confederate lines — had now become a likelihood dependent only on the success of Union armies.


The question possessed both practical and policy implications. Since the beginning of the war, Union field officers had experienced varying degrees of success in offering care and protection to the thousands of slaves fleeing to Union lines. Policy makers in the Lincoln administration, free from the day-to-day demands of camp management, dealt instead with a growing chorus of voices calling for a plan for how best to absorb as many as 4 million freed men and women.


“We must collect facts and use them as ammunition,” argued Samuel Gridley Howe, a noted physician and abolitionist who was also husband to Julia Ward Howe, composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The government needed “a general and reliable” survey “of the actual condition of those … out of the house of bondage; their wants and their capacities,” he wrote.


In March 1863, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton responded to this and other calls for action by creating the three-member American Freedman Inquiry Commission. Robert Dale Owen, a Democratic politician and social reformer who opposed slavery but stood apart from mainstream abolitionists, chaired the group. He was joined by James McKaye, a New York-based abolitionist, and Howe himself. The secretary of war tasked them with investigating the conditions and needs of freedmen within Union lines.


After establishing headquarters in New York City, Owen, Howe and McKaye embarked on trips to visit as many parts of the Union-occupied South as possible and to send questionnaires to those areas they could not visit. At each stop they interviewed escaped slaves as well as white men and women who worked in the camps. In April and May of 1863, all three commissioners visited several contraband camps in Virginia, and in June McKaye went on alone to Port Royal, S.C. The result was a treasure trove of historical insight into the lives and conditions of thousands of the newly liberated.


Excerpts from two of these initial interviews provide a sense of what the commissioners heard. In response to the question, “How many of the people called contrabands, have come under your observation?”, Capt. C. B. Wilder, superintendent of contrabands at Fortress Monroe, Va., responded, “Some 10,000 have come under our control, to be fed and clothed.” A query about the extent to which contrabands communicated with those still enslaved elicited the information that “we have had men here who have gone back 200 miles.” Wilder continued that “thousands upon thousands” of those still in slavery would respond positively to a federal policy that “would cause them to be treated with fairness, their wages punctually paid and employment furnished them in the army.”


An interview with Harry McMillan, a 40-year-old escaped slave, in Beaufort, S.C., in June provided insights into life under slavery, and is worth quoting at length:

Question: How many hours a day did you work?

Answer: Under the old secesh times every morning till night–beginning at daylight and continuing till 5 or 6 at night.

Q: But you stopped for your meals?

Answer: You had to get your victuals standing at your hoe. . . .

Q: If a man did not do his task what happened?

A: He was stripped off, tied up and whipped.

Q: What other punishments were used?

A: The punishments were whipping, putting you in the stocks and making you wear irons and a chain at work. Then they had a collar to put round your neck with two horns . . . so that you could not lie down on your back or belly. . . . Sometimes they dug a hole like a well with a door on top [and kept you] in it two or three weeks or a month.

Q: In speaking of each other do you say “negro”?

A: We call each other colored people, black people, but not negro because we used that word in secesh times.

Q: Do the colored people like to go to Church?

A: Yes, sir; they are fond of that; they sing psalms, put up prayers, and sing their religious songs.

Q: Did your masters ever see you learning to read?

A: No, sir; you could not let your masters see you read; but now the colored people are fond of sending their children to school.

Q: What is the reason of that?

A: Because the children in after years will be able to tell us ignorant ones how to do for ourselves.

Q: Would the colored men like to go back to Africa?

A: No, sir; there is no disposition to go back, they would rather stay where they are.



The findings from these and dozens of other interviews provided the basis for a preliminary report issued on June 30, 1863. “These refugees,” the commissioners found, were “loyal men, putting faith in the Government, looking to it for guidance and protection” and “willing to work for moderate wages if promptly paid.” They were “easily managed, not given to quarreling among themselves, of temperate habits, cheerful and uncomplaining … whenever they are treated with justice and common humanity.”


Testimony also suggested that less involvement by Northern aid societies and equality before the law would solve any potential problems with dependency. A teacher at Port Royal made the case that “land should get into their hands” and would “more than anything else … make them a self-relying and self-respecting people.” Owen, Howe and McKaye stressed that charity was at best a temporary solution, and freedmen should be put to work as soon as possible. Those vices they possessed, the report contended, were “such as appertain to their former social condition.”


That same summer, Howe traveled to Ontario to study conditions among blacks there, most of whom had escaped from American slavery. Owen stayed in New York to conduct extensive research on African-American history and prepare a questionnaire to be sent to officials involved with freedmen throughout the country. His questions included: “Are the colored people generally industrious and self-supporting or not? Do the mulattoes seek public charity in greater or less proportion than whites? Do you consider them on the whole as valuable members of the community, or not?”


At the end of 1863, Owen and Howe toured contraband camps in Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, while McKaye traveled to New Orleans to conduct interviews there. In May 1864, the commissioners submitted their final report (http://www.civilwarhome.com/commissionreport.htm). Owen, who was the principal author, divided the report into three sections.


The first — “Slavery” — presented an extended discussion of the history of slavery that constituted nearly two-thirds of the document and at the least demonstrated that Owens was an exhaustive researcher.


The second — “Emancipation” — was devoted to an extensive justification of Lincoln’s proclamation. The stakes were high, it proposed, nothing less than “the progress of civilization.” Owens argued that Emancipation’s “solution involves not alone the social destiny of 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 of human beings, but also the permanent peace and the national honor of one of the great powers of the world.”


The final chapter — “The Future in the United States of the African Race” — made the case for striking a balance between what the historian Eric Foner has labeled as “laissez-faire and interventionist approaches to the aftermath of emancipation.” Benevolent guardianship was good, but only if it was temporary and a means to self-reliance. “The essential is that we secure to them the means of making their own way; that we give them, to use the familiar phrase, a ‘fair chance,’” wrote Owen. “If, like whites, they are to be self-supporting, then, like whites they ought to have those rights, civil and political, without which they are but laboring as a man labors with hands bound. … Above all, guard them against the virtual restoration of slavery in any form, under any pretext, and then let them take care of themselves.”


The report spurred the immediate creation of the Senate Committee on Emancipation, and later the Committee on Slavery and Freedmen, with Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as the chair. Sumner felt so strongly about the report’s importance that he commissioned the printing and distribution of 3,000 copies to legislators and other Washington officials.


The establishment of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands also resulted from the report, but it took longer than anticipated. A turf battle over which cabinet department — Treasury or War — would have jurisdiction was not resolved, in favor of the Department of War, until March 1865.


The bureau played a brief but important role in the progress of African-Americans in the immediate postwar years. But its dismantlement in 1872 and the rise of sharecropping and “Jim Crow” laws ultimately led to Owen’s greatest fear, “the virtual restoration of slavery” and white America’s unwillingness to let African-Americans “take care of themselves.



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Sources: Mary Farmer-Kaiser, “Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, & Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation”; Carol Faulkner, “Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement”; Eric Foner, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877”; James M. McPherson, “The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction.”


Author Rick Beard, an independent historian, is senior adviser for the Pennsylvania Civil War 150 and volunteer coordinator of the Civil War Sesquicentennial for the American Association for State and Local History.

A Crucial Article on College and Black Awareness: Got the Grades & Full Scholarship but Still Not Ready

Scenes from a college fair (O. Perry Walker High School)


The labyrinth surrounding scholarships and admissions doesn't account for the messy realities of poor families' lives.



  Is there anything you can do to close the 'gaps' revealed in this article?
Perhaps share information, explanation, time, financial support, expertise and experience...even your warm concern to support students, parents and families that might be dealing with some of the issues described below.
lovu,
Kentke

The Arcane Rules That Keep Low-Income Kids Out of College

Sarah Carr

Smart students who are admitted with full scholarships can still be defeated by regulations they don't fully understand.



One spring afternoon, O. Perry Walker High School Principal Mary Laurie made her way to the school's courtyard, where a lone student sat at a picnic table with a large stack of papers in front of him and a frustrated look on his face. Laurie recognized the student as a shy senior with one of the highest GPAs in his class.

The documents, it turned out, were all from Tuskegee University. Tuskegee had accepted the 18-year-old, offering him a full scholarship. But they required a $500 deposit within the next few days if he wanted to secure his spot. The student had no idea what to do.

"If that's where you want to go, let me know," Laurie said. "I'll try to get the five hundred dollars."

The student said nothing.

"You want to go to college, baby?" Laurie asked gently.

The young man nodded and wandered off, a confused look on his face.

If one of Walker's top students was struggling to navigate the college-admissions and financial-aid maze, Laurie worried about how less-motivated students were faring. Earlier that winter, she had decided Walker needed to do a better job helping its students sift through the process. Now she saw how far the school still had to go.

Walker employed two college counselors, but they had their hands full helping caseloads of hundreds. Laurie wanted someone to create a comprehensive data system so the school knew, at any given moment, how many of its students had taken the ACT, been accepted into colleges, and qualified for the state's main college scholarship program, known as TOPS.

Data had not always been Walker's strongest suit. More intangibly, Laurie hoped to do a better job ensuring "everyone was speaking the same language" when it came to college admissions and financial aid.

She hired Andrea Smith Bailey, the wife of assistant principal Mark Bailey, to help with these new tasks. Andrea, who was finishing a master's degree in counseling psychology, began working at Walker part-time. But her job could have kept a team of full-time employees busy.

Creating a data system was the easy part, even though new information about college acceptances, ACT scores, and grade point averages poured in daily. Translating the "language of college" proved far more difficult. The labyrinthine rules and processes surrounding scholarships, loans, and financial aid did not account for the messy realities of poor families' lives.

One senior, for instance, qualified for a state scholarship that provided full tuition at a two-year technical or community college. The student couldn't access the money, however, because he lived on his own and had no parent or guardian to sign for him. Bailey tried to register him as "homeless" so he could sign his own forms.

She discovered it took mountains of paperwork even to qualify as homeless--particularly since one of the boy's grandmothers had falsely claimed him as a dependent on recent tax forms. "We have a lot of kids who just don't fit in the federal government parameters of what's a family, what's a parent," Bailey said.

The scholarship parameters also weren't designed with a thorough understanding of what low-income students are up against. TOPS promises qualifying students a free ride if they earn a 2.5 grade point average and score at least a 20 on the ACT. But the scholarship fails to cover numerous expenses, and this keeps many low-income students from even starting college.

One Walker student planned to attend Louisiana State University through a state scholarship. But the grant did not cover the $150 he needed to get on a wait list for a dorm room, or the housing deposit. Bailey delved into the student's financials, trying to figure out when his next paycheck from Taco Bell would clear so he would not miss the deposit deadline and find himself homeless in Baton Rouge.

The communication barriers extend in all directions: The federal and state government bureaucrats little fathom the complexities of low-income students' home lives. But the students, most of them first-generation college aspirants, often do not understand what a "loan" or "interest rate" means--much less how to make sure they maximize their TOPS and Pell Grant payouts if they qualify for both. (For reasons that were nebulous to Bailey, some students receive full payments from both while others do not.)

Bailey had worked as a family case manager for Habitat for Humanity between several education-related jobs, a position that frequently required her to delve into clients' finances. Several times, she encountered applicants with outstanding student debt who never realized they had even signed for a loan. She grew convinced Walker needed to include "college-going skills" as part of its curriculum. And senior year was too late to start those conversations.

She discovered it took mountains of paperwork even to qualify the boy as homeless--particularly since one of his grandmothers had falsely claimed him as a dependent. Even Walker's best students struggled to find their way through the financial aid maze. The student bound for Louisiana State University, for instance, had previously considered Morehouse College, an all-male, historically black institution in Atlanta. He asked Bailey if he could borrow her phone one morning "to make a couple of calls about college scholarships."



Bailey agreed, and a few minutes later she heard him asking someone at a college in New York for a scholarship to Morehouse. Bailey put the pieces together after some investigating, realizing the student had read something about a college in New York that was giving out scholarships. He had assumed that meant they were awarding grants to any college.



"He was just trying to do whatever he could," she said.



Walker had already forged a strong relationship with one beleaguered local university, Southern University at New Orleans. Several of the school's graduates enrolled there each year. Unlike others who dismissed SUNO as subpar--a destination only for those who could not get in anywhere else--Laurie saw the historically black university as a viable option for many of her students. In her eyes, the school's proximity to students' families, homes, and support networks was an asset for many. "This is a small town," she said. "People don't always leave."

***

Arriving upstairs one morning, Walker's upperclassmen encountered a gigantic banner from SUNO. Peppy university cheerleaders wearing short skirts in the school's gold-and-blue colors greeted the Walker students with smiling faces at the recruiting fair.

It was Walker's first SUNO Day, part of the growing partnership between the two schools. Table after table offered students information about the university's admissions and financial aid, degree programs and extracurricular activities, along with free giveaways including Skittles packets and coin purses. Staff from both Walker and SUNO wore T-shirts honoring the two schools' mascots. The leaders of both institutions--SUNO chancellor Victor Ukpolo and Mary Laurie--circulated in the background, lending the event an official air. Laurie paced behind the tables where Walker students gathered information, shouting each time they approached a dean or official, "Ask those critical questions! Ask those critical questions!"

SUNO is a part of the Southern University System, the only historically black university system in the country. The school opened in 1959 during the last gasp of school segregation--a final victory for advocates of Jim Crow. Construction began two years after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate was not equal.

Civil rights groups bitterly opposed SUNO at the outset, since its opening seemed to perpetuate a segregation they had long decried and the high court now pronounced illegal. The school opened in its first year with 158 freshmen and 15 professors in Pontchartrain Park, a neighborhood of subdivisions created for middle-class blacks after World War II.

Laurie graduated from the University of New Orleans, but she took some of her education-methods classes at SUNO. She says it would have taken her even longer than a decade to finish college had it not been for SUNO's night classes, one of the many ways the four-year university tries to accommodate the schedules of working students. (Laurie raised three babies and worked nearly full-time while attending college.)

In Laurie's five years at Walker, she forged a friendly relationship with the college, sending dozens of graduates there each year. Laurie saw parallels between the two organizations: Both were committed to open access and serving students whom other schools would not take. Both were led by African-Americans and known for the familiar, folksy warmth with which they treated students. Both struggled at times to "keep their numbers up" in an era of strict school accountability.

SUNO struggled more than Walker, though, a shortcoming that nearly led to the university's demise. In 2009, the school posted a six-year graduation rate of 8 percent, the second lowest of any urban public college in the United States. SUNO's critics dismissed the university in the same terms they used to describe the pre-Katrina New Orleans public schools: failing, inefficient, outdated, dysfunctional. But unlike the public schools, they added, SUNO failed to graduate most of its students and left many of them in crippling debt from student loans.

In January 2011, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal commissioned a study to explore the implications of a merger between UNO and SUNO, the only four-year public universities in the city. Most observers took the governor's action as a sign he supported shuttering SUNO. The pushback, however, was swift and strong.

At a March 2011 rally, the Reverend Jesse Jackson mobilized the crowd by comparing the fight to keep SUNO open with the civil rights marches of the 1960s. "You weren't born when the March on Washington happened," he told the students and other SUNO supporters who crammed into the school's gymnasium, "and you missed out on the march to Montgomery. But God always gives us other chances to sacrifice."

Some of SUNO's defenders worried its closure could shut hundreds of New Orleans high school students out of the chance at a college education. By 2011, SUNO was one of a dwindling number of public universities that tried to accept virtually any student, regardless of academic background. The debate over its future raised broader questions: Should universities be open to all, or serve only those with demonstrated academic abilities?

In Louisiana, meanwhile, the Board of Regents was phasing in tougher admissions standards across its four-year university system. Universities can no longer accept students who require a single remedial course. To avoid remedials, students usually need to earn at least an 18 on the ACT in English and a 19 in math.

New Orleans guidance counselors worry the tougher admission standards will disproportionately affect low-income minority students who, on average, score lower on the ACT. In 2011, the average composite ACT score for a New Orleans public school student was 18 on a 36-point scale. That means about half of the students who took the ACT--a select group in and of itself at some schools--did not qualify for admission to any four-year in-state university under the new standards. Walker posted an average score of 17.8 in 2011, and most of its graduates needed at least one remedial class.

Laurie supported SUNO, although she remained frustrated by the segregation that defined both New Orleans and American society more generally. When Laurie thought about race relations in 21st-century America, it reminded her of "parallel play"--the term used to describe toddlers playing side by side yet utterly disengaged from each other. It depressed her to think that the nation still resembled a bunch of self-absorbed two- and three-year-olds so wrapped up in their own lives that they remained oblivious to the range and diversity of experiences surrounding them. America had mastered the illusion of togetherness.

***

After encountering the straight-A student who had won admission to Tuskegee, Laurie summoned his guidance counselor.

The woman explained that three different universities had offered him full scholarships because of his high grades. While the offers made him the envy of his classmates, the teen had no idea what to do. As deadlines loomed, he sifted aimlessly through paperwork. The guidance counselor had reached out to his mother, but the woman brushed her off.

Laurie asked if there might be a substance abuse issue.

"No," the counselor said. "I guess she didn't want me to pressure her." Laurie pondered this for a few seconds.

"Maybe if you've never been to college . . ." her voice trailed off.

"She might not know. I just don't want him to miss these deadlines and end up with nothing."

"Originally he wanted to go to college out West," said the counselor. "But Mom said she didn't want him going anyplace she couldn't drive." They limited their search to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as a result.

Laurie thought a little more.

"I'm sure his mother wants him to go to college," she said. "She just doesn't know how it works. But at the same time, we dropped the ball. We shouldn't be at this point."

That night, Laurie called the student's mother. The woman said she had left the decision up to her son.

"I got the feeling Mom had probably been in a situation where she had been talked down to," Laurie said later. "Sometimes it can be intimidating to talk to someone who is telling you something and knows more about it. We are not doing a good enough job of helping them understand how college works. If one of our top students with all these scholarship offers doesn't have a sense of how to make a best choice, what about all the rest?"

Teaching students and parents the intricacies of deposits, scholarships, interest rates, and loans can help only so much. It might, for instance, have prevented the eager student from calling up a college in New York and asking for a scholarship to Morehouse. But information and knowledge aren't enough if families and students feel so disempowered they shut down whenever the subject of college comes up or they face a crucial decision.

That problem has deeper roots and more complicated solutions. It requires changing long-ingrained habits of mind and feelings of inferiority. As Laurie knows all too well, you cannot teach someone the language of college if he lacks the confidence to start the conversation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This post is adapted from the book Hope Against Hope.
Sarah Carr is a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of the book Hope Against Hope.



I hate to do it, but......on an even sadder note, as Black History Month draws to an end, one year ago today, one of our youth that might have enjoyed exploring his potential in college, was taken from us. Least we forget~ 
Tuesday, Feb. 26 - 2012



Trayvon Martin,

a 17-year-old black boy, is killed in Sanford, Florida; police arrest shooter George Zimmerman only after national outcry against claim that Stand Your Ground Law barred his prosecution.

Keep A Prayer for a Free Autonomous Mali in your Heart



Malians wave to a French military helicopter near Bourem, Mali, on February 17, 2013.

(AP Photo/Pascal Guyot)

Children gather at the door of Mohamed Salia's madrassa in Gao, on February 18, 2013.

Nearly a month after the al-Qaeda-linked militants

were driven out of Gao and into the surrounding villages, students

are now returning to the city's Quranic schools.

Many classrooms, though, are still half full,  as tens of thousands

of people fled the fighting and strict Islamic rule imposed by the extremists.

(AP Photo/Jerome Delay)



The Heart is Always Bigger in Black History Month

I hope your Valentine's Day was ringing with love. Let me make sure with this Black History Month gem.

A few years ago, I 'married ' these two holidays by highlighting the fashion sense of some deep chocolate men from Africa. After enjoying my Valentine to you this year, come back and revisit the February 2010 archives by clicking here, to enjoy the thrill of fashion and color again.
http://www.knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/2010/02/valentine-chocolates-bask-in-beauty-of.html

This year my gift is for your ears, and yes, your eyes will be blessed too. So click the link and enjoy the video~
http://screen.yahoo.com/hymn-lining-disappearing-african-american-182216113.html

Lovu,
Kentke

Stress: The Roots of Resilience and More

I've shared in the past that I pay alot of attention to new scientific and cosmic discoveries. I practice the old adage, "As it is above, so it is below". I interpret by accepting that my Sweet Little Life, is an integral part of a great wholeness. Therefore, what is happening that is expanding and liberating in one part, is also available to be applied within my own Life and personal world.

Scientists are doing a lot of work with the genes of Life these days. One thing that fascinates me, is the discovery that one way genes work in our bodies, is to turn on ~ or off ~ certain functions, and predilections for disease or illness.

Because I also believe in the 'Power of the Word', I practice, self-healing, and the renewing of my body, simply by declaring the perfect functioning, and wholeness of my cells, tissues and complete body system. So knowing that my body will listen and respond to what I tell it and declare about it's state, I get really excited that scientists are determining what part of the brain or body I need to be visualizing and directing my attention to, when speaking the word. Oh yes, metaphysical work going on here. The alchemist(doctor/healer) is In!

I'm interpreting this, that we can speak to our genetic make-up, and direct it to make connections, that create new neuronal networks and release the chemicals that are needed within our body to create greater health and well-being. We can also close circuits that may pour too much of certain chemicals into the mix, and create emotional and physical havoc in our systems.

No I'm not crazy....You just have to have been hanging out in the realm of Infinite Possibilities as long as I have (smile). I've also been naming myself, a "magnet for the Best in Life" for many many years, and this has resulted in pulling really deep and wonderful transforming information to me, from everywhere, and out of all types of disciplines. I trust this  Inner Magnet's great love for Life as me.

Bear with me a bit more. You know I haven't shared my thoughts with you much lately. I've just been 'throwing up articles', so I hope you'll not begrudge me sharing these connections and revelations I'm receiving.

Right now America, is all up in arms about the amount of guns that are truly warfare weapons, that are amassed throughout the population. The murders of the innocent Sandy Hook schoolchildren a few months ago, has been followed each week, by some headline news of more multiple murders that are senseless killings. No one wants to go to the heart of the matter, which is that it's the 'thinking', concepts and belief system of American culture that is at the root of this madness.

This past weekend, Chris Kyle, a man who held the reputation of being the most lethal sniper in the United States military history, with 160 confirmed kills, (out of 255 claimed)  was himself killed, while trying to be of support to Ray Routh, a young troubled former Marine.

After leaving the military, besides writing a best selling book, Kyle had formed an organization that provids support and counseling for troubled veterans.  Routh's mother had asked for help with her son. So to get acquainted, Kyle and a friend took Routh to a shooting range for target practice, and there Routh shot them both dead and stole Kyle's truck.

According to the New York Times, five months earlier, police officers were called to Routh's home. "Officers found him near his home, shirtless and shoeless, and he told them he was a Marine veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, the report said. His mother told officers that he had been drinking and had become upset when his father told him he was going to sell his gun. Mr. Routh was taken into protective custody and transported to a Dallas psychiatric hospital."


I digress here, because post-traumatic stress disorder is a serious problem in American society. And it is not only traumatic stress brought on by the experiences of war-related military service. Traumatic experiences haunt and stun many of us into a stunted, dazed and confused mindset, about our worthiness, existence and our right place in the world. What is saddest, is the duration and the intensity of suffering that can last a lifetime. And I'm sure, it can be passed on, in someway through our genes and socialization to future generations.

Think of the experience of Native Americans, and the Japanese Americans, or Chinese immigrant workers. I particularly am grateful for the work of Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary on how the effects of the experience of slavery still permeate, perculate and influence the lives and reactions of both African American and white people today. Many have found her research and book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome quite illuminating.

Okay~
Enough of the digression. I'm reminded that my purpose is to inspire and elevate the Good that it's more visable to all. So let me get right to it with this really interesting article below that talks of the research being done that can help us to be even more resilliant in the face of traumatic events. 

Read the article to the end, and see what your Heart of Love/Intelligence pulls out for you to hold onto. Be still and get quiet, because there's riches in the silence and truth in the depths. You know how it's said that we human beings only use a portion of the power of our brain? There's alot of interesting information in the article about how our mind works . See what's of value to you, that can be reflected back into your Life. 

I challenge you to be imaginative in the ways you can 'play' with any 'gems'.  Then practice regularly applying the 'Good knewz' within your Life and experience.

lovu,
Kentke

Nature International Weekly Journal of Science

Stress: The Roots of Resilience

Most people bounce back from trauma — but some never recover. Scientists are trying to work out what underlies the difference.

 By Virginia Hughes

 October 2012

Elizabeth Ebaugh is finally comfortable visiting the
bridge from which she was thrown 26 years ago.



On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car and tossed the bag onto the empty passenger seat. But as she tried to close the door, she found it blocked by a slight, unkempt man with a big knife. He forced her to slide over and took her place behind the wheel.

The man drove aimlessly along country roads, ranting about his girlfriend's infidelity and the time he had spent in jail. Ebaugh, a psychotherapist who was 30 years old at the time, used her training to try to calm the man and negotiate her freedom. But after several hours and a few stops, he took her to a motel, watched a pornographic film and raped her. Then he forced her back into the car.

She pleaded with him to let her go, and he said that he would. So when he stopped on a bridge at around 2 a.m. and told her to get out, she thought she was free. Then he motioned for her to jump. “That's the time where my system, I think, just lost it,” Ebaugh recalls. Succumbing to the terror and exhaustion of the night, she fainted.

Ebaugh awoke in freefall. The man had thrown her, limp and handcuffed, off the bridge four storeys above a river reservoir. When she hit the frigid water, she turned onto her back and started kicking. “At that point, there was no part of me that thought I wasn't going to make it,” she says.

Few people will experience psychological and physical abuse as terrible as the abuse Ebaugh endured that night. But extreme stress is not unusual. In the United States, an estimated 50–60% of people will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives, whether through military combat, assault, a serious car accident or a natural disaster. Acute stress triggers an intense physiological response and cements an association in the brain's circuits between the event and fear. If this association lingers for more than a month, as it does for about 8% of trauma victims, it is considered to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The three main criteria for diagnosis are recurring and frightening memories, avoidance of any potential triggers for such memories and a heightened state of arousal.

Ebaugh experienced these symptoms in the months after her attack and was diagnosed with PTSD. But with the help of friends, psychologists and spiritual practices, she recovered. After about five years, she no longer met the criteria for the disorder. She opened her own private practice, married and had a son.

About two-thirds of people diagnosed with PTSD eventually recover. “The vast majority of people actually do OK in the face of horrendous stresses and traumas,” says Robert Ursano, director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Ursano and other researchers want to know what underlies people's mental strength. “How does one understand the resilience of the human spirit?” he asks.

Since the 1970s, scientists have learned that several psychosocial factors — such as strong social networks, recalling and confronting fears and an optimistic outlook — help people to recover. But today, scientists in the field are searching for the biological factors involved. Some have found specific genetic variants in humans and in animals that influence an individual's odds of developing PTSD. Other groups are investigating how the body and brain change during the recovery process and why psychological interventions do not always work. The hope is that this research might lead to therapies that enhance resilience.

A natural response

Although no one can fully understand what was going on in Ebaugh's mind during her attack, scientists have some idea of what was happening to her body. As soon as Ebaugh saw her attacker and his knife, her brain's pituitary gland sent signals to her adrenal glands, atop the kidneys, to start pumping out the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. In turn, her pulse quickened, her blood pressure rose and beads of sweat formed on her skin. Her senses sharpened and her neural circuits formed strong memories, so that if she ever encountered this threat in the future, she would remember the fear and flee.

The repercussions were profound. For the first week after the abduction, “I felt like a newborn baby”, Ebaugh says, “like I had to be held, or at least be in the presence of somebody”. She shivered constantly, was easily startled and felt only fear. She could not go near the grocery store.

Nearly every trauma victim experiences PTSD symptoms to some degree. Many people who are diagnosed with the disorder go on to have severe depression, substance-abuse problems or suicidal thoughts. PTSD can take a horrific toll. Between 2005 and 2009, as a growing number of soldiers faced multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, suicide rates in the US Army and Marines nearly doubled.

Expand

Over the past two decades, researchers have used various kinds of imaging techniques to peer inside the brains of trauma victims. These studies report that in people with PTSD, two areas of the brain that are sensitive to stress shrink: the hippocampus, a deep region in the limbic system important for memory, and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a part of the prefrontal cortex that is involved in reasoning and decision-making. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks blood flow in the brain, has revealed that when people who have PTSD are reminded of the trauma, they tend to have an underactive prefrontal cortex and an overactive amygdala, another limbic brain region, which processes fear and emotion (see 'The signature of stress').

People who experience trauma but do not develop PTSD, on the other hand, show more activity in the prefrontal cortex. In August1, Kerry Ressler, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his colleagues showed that these resilient individuals have stronger physical connections between the ACC and the hippocampus. This suggests that resilience depends partly on communication between the reasoning circuitry in the cortex and the emotional circuitry of the limbic system. “It's as if [resilient people] can have a very healthy response to negative stimuli,” says Dennis Charney, a psychiatrist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who has conducted several brain-imaging studies of rape victims, soldiers and other trauma survivors.

Environmental protection

After her abduction, Ebaugh began seeing a psychotherapist and several alternative-medicine practitioners. But more than anything else, she attributes her resilience to being surrounded by caring people — beginning within minutes of her escape.

After Ebaugh crawled up the rocky riverbank, a truck driver picked her up, took her to a nearby convenience store and bought her a cup of hot tea. Police, when they arrived, were sympathetic and patient. The doctor at the hospital, she says, treated her like a daughter. A close friend took her in for a time. And her family offered reassurance and emotional support. “For the first month, I almost had to tell people to stop coming because I was so surrounded by friends and community,” she says.

Studies of many kinds of trauma have shown that social support is a strong buffer against PTSD and other psychological problems. James Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has done a series of experiments in which women lie in an fMRI scanner and see 'threat cues' on a screen. They are told that between 4 and 10 seconds later, they may receive a small electric shock on the ankle. The cue triggers sensory arousal and activates brain regions associated with fear and anxiety, but when the women hold the hands of their husbands or friends, these responses diminish.

Social interactions are complex and involve many brain circuits and chemicals; no one knows exactly why they provide relief. Being touched by someone is thought to stimulate the release of natural opioids, such as endorphins, in the brain. The ACC is packed with opioid receptors, suggesting that touch could influence its response to stress.

Other clues come from the hormone oxytocin, which courses through the brain during social interaction and has been shown to boost trust and reduce anxiety. In one imaging study4, participants viewed frightening images after receiving nasal sprays of either oxytocin or a placebo. Those who sniffed oxytocin showed reduced activation in the amygdala and weaker connections between the amygdala and the brainstem, which control some stress responses, such as heart rate. The oxytocin surge that comes from being around other people could, like endorphins, help to reduce the stress response.

Past social interactions may also affect how a person responds to trauma. Chronic neglect and abuse unquestionably lead to a host of psychological problems and a greater risk of PTSD. Ressler, however, points to a factor that is well recognized but poorly understood: 'stress inoculation'. Researchers have found that rodents5 and monkeys6, at least, are more resilient later in life if they experience isolated stress events, such as a shock or a brief separation from their mothers, early in infancy.

Ebaugh says that early stress — and the confidence she gained in conquering it — helped her to recover from her traumatic abduction. She was born with a condition that made her feet turn inwards. At age ten, she underwent surgery to rebuild her knees followed by a year of intensive rehabilitation. “It wasn't foreign to me to be hurt and have to walk the walk of being strong again,” she says. “It's like a muscle, I think, that gets built up.”

Resilient by nature

Although most people, like Ebaugh, recover from trauma, some never do. Some scientists are seeking explanations for such differences in the epigenome, the chemical modifications that help to switch genes on and off. Others are looking in the genes themselves. Take, for example, FKBP5, a gene involved in hormonal feedback loops in the brain that drive the stress response. In 2008, Ressler and his colleagues showed that in low-income, inner-city residents who had been physically or sexually abused as children, certain variants in FKBP5 predisposed them to developing PTSD symptoms in adulthood. Other variants offered protection.

The most talked-about biological marker of resilience is neuropeptide Y (NPY), a hormone released in the brain during stress. Unlike the stress hormones that put the body on high alert in response to trauma, NPY acts at receptors in several parts of the brain — including the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and brainstem — to help shut off the alarm. “In resiliency, these brake systems are turning out to be the most relevant,” says Renu Sah, a neuroscientist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.

Interest in NPY and resilience took off in 2000, partly because of a study of healthy US Army soldiers who participated in a survival course designed to simulate the conditions endured by prisoners of war, such as food and sleep deprivation, isolation and intense interrogations8. NPY levels went up in the soldiers' blood within hours of the interrogations. Special Forces soldiers who had trained to be resilient had significantly higher NPY levels than typical soldiers.

Researchers are now conducting animal experiments to study how NPY works. In one experiment, a team at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis restrained a rat in a tight-fitting plastic pouch for 30 minutes, then released it into a box with another rat9. The restraint made the rat so anxious that it avoided interacting with the other animal for 90 minutes. But when rats were injected with NPY before the treatment, they interacted with cage-mates as if nothing had happened.

The work could lead to treatments. Charney's group at Mount Sinai is carrying out a phase II clinical trial of an NPY nasal spray for individuals with PTSD. Others are investigating small molecules that can cross the blood–brain barrier and block certain receptors that control NPY release.



Click here, then zoom in to read this graphic:
http://www.nature.com/news/stress-the-roots-of-resilience-1.11570

Conflict resolution

The US military is leading the hunt for additional biological markers of resilience. Since 2008 — driven in part by soaring suicide rates among soldiers — the US Army has collaborated with the National Institute of Mental Health and several academic institutions on a US$65-million project called Army STARRS (the Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers). The project has many parts, including a retrospective look at de-identified medical and administrative records for 1.6 million soldiers, in search of early warnings of suicide, PTSD and other mental-health problems. STARRS scientists are also collecting data — such as blood samples, medical histories and cognitive testing results — on tens of thousands of current soldiers. The researchers expect to publish their first findings early next year.

The military also funds research into animal models of resilience. Most rodents will quickly learn to associate painful foot shocks with a certain cue, such as a tone or a specific cage. After they have learned the association, the rodents freeze on experiencing the cue, even without the shock. Several years ago, Abraham Palmer, a geneticist now at the University of Chicago in Illinois, made a line of resilient mice by selectively breeding mice that froze for abnormally short periods of time. After about four generations, he had mice that froze for about half the time of typical animals10. The effect was not due to a difference in pain sensitivity or general learning ability. This month, Luke Johnson, a neuroscientist at the Uniformed Services University, will present data at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, showing that these mice have uncommonly low activity in the amygdala and hippocampus, consistent with human studies of PTSD resilience. They also have low levels of corticosterone, a stress hormone, in their urine.

“They have a quieter system, even at rest,” says Johnson. “It suggests that there are underlying biological traits that are associated with the capacity of the animal for fear memory.” In future experiments, Johnson plans to use the mice to study NPY and potential new therapies.

Europe Moves Ahead on Internet Personal Privacy Protections

The New York Times
February 3, 2013

The European Union is considering far-reaching privacy regulations that would give the citizens of its member countries significant control over how Web sites and marketing companies collect and use data about them. Years in the making, the effort stands in stark contrast to the much slower pace of discussions about online privacy laws in Washington.

Reports in The Times and elsewhere have documented the dubious but legal ways in which companies, including many that most people do not even know exist, build profiles of people’s behaviors, browsing histories and shopping habits by tracking them online and off, through data from retailers, for instance. Those profiles are then sold to marketers and others without the knowledge of the person whose information is being traded.

Europe has historically been more protective of personal information than the United States, which still has no general law to protect people’s privacy online while most E.U. nations do. The privacy policies of American companies are voluntary, with the exception of protection under federal laws for certain kinds of sensitive information like health records and data about children younger than 13. Now, European policy makers are proposing to harmonize new, tougher rules across the 27-member union.

Several proposals would go well beyond the voluntary policies of companies like Google. They would require companies to obtain permission before collecting personal data and specify exactly what information will be collected and how it will be used. If asked, companies would have to provide users with data that has been collected about them and allow them to fix mistakes. One proposal would include a so-called “right to be forgotten” that would make it mandatory for companies like Facebook to delete all information about users who want to wipe the slate clean.

Internet companies and the Obama administration are lobbying against some of the measures, which they argue would place onerous restrictions on services that people want to use and impede the sharing of information between Europe and the United States, particularly between law enforcement agencies. But privacy advocates say that those concerns are overblown and that most Internet companies and news sites would easily get the consent of users who already willingly hand them personal information.

Senior European leaders like Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission, have promised that the final policy will protect consumers in ways that will not stifle new ideas and data sharing. The E.U. could approve a new privacy policy later this year.

Efforts to improve protections do not appear to be advancing in Washington. American policy makers have made little progress on a sensible proposal made by the Federal Trade Commission in 2010 known as “do not track.” Carried out properly, the measure would give users an easy way to prevent companies from surreptitiously amassing information about them to pitch them ads.

Ideally, Web browsers would have a default setting that barred tracking but allow consumers to opt for tracking, which many might do because they want to receive special offers. (The New York Times tracks users on its Web site but does not monitor their activities on other sites or sell their personal data to third parties.)

The Obama administration has talked with technology and marketing companies about creating voluntary industry standards. But the best way to ensure that Americans can keep their personal information private is through federal legislation backed by regulatory enforcement. Europe is setting an example of how that might be accomplished. While the United States is unlikely to go as far as the E.U., it needs to do a lot more.

Wonderful Knewz - Timbuktu Manuscripts Safe!

UPDATE - Bulk of Timbuktu Manuscripts Safe, Unharmed say Experts

Wed, Jan 30 2013
By Pascal Fletcher

DAKAR, Jan 30 (Reuters) - The vast majority of Timbuktu's ancient manuscripts in state and private collections appear to be unharmed after the Malian Saharan city's 10-month occupation by Islamist rebel fighters, who burnt some of the scripts, experts said on Wednesday.

The news, based on information from persons directly involved with the conservation of the historic texts, came as a relief to the world's cultural community which had been dismayed by varying media reports of widespread destruction of the priceless manuscripts.

After French and Malian troops on Sunday retook Timbuktu, a UNESCO World Heritage site and ancient seat of Islamic learning, from Islamist insurgent occupiers, the city's mayor reported the fleeing rebels had set fire to a major manuscript library.

But experts said that while up to 2,000 manuscripts may have been lost at the South African-funded Ahmed Baba Institute ransacked by the rebels, the bulk of the around 300,000 texts existing in Timbuktu and its surrounding region were believed to be safe.

"I can say that the vast majority of the collections appear from our reports not to have been destroyed, damaged or harmed in any way," Cape Town University's Professor Shamil Jeppie, an expert on the Saharan city's manuscripts, told Reuters.

A Malian source also directly involved with the conservation of the Timbuktu manuscripts told Reuters 95 percent of the total documents were "safe and sound".

The two sources said that soon after Tuareg rebel fighters swept into Timbuktu on April 1 in a rebellion later hijacked by sharia-observing Islamist radicals, curators and collectors of the manuscripts had hidden the texts away for safety.

"They had shipped them out and distributed them around," Jeppie said. The Malian source, asking not to be named, said the manuscripts had been concealed "a little bit everywhere".

Some of the mansuscripts that constitute Timbuktu's "treasure of learning" date back to the 13th century.

Brittle, written in ornate calligraphy, and ranging from scholarly treatises to old commercial invoices, the documents represent a compendium of human knowledge on everything from law, sciences and medicine to history and politics. Some experts compare them in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Ahmed Baba Institute, a Malian state library, is named after a Timbuktu-born contemporary of William Shakespeare and housed more than 20,000 ancient scholarly manuscripts.

Timbuktu was liberated by French and Malian forces as part of a rapid French-led military offensive launched on Jan. 11 that drove fighters from the Islamist alliance occupying Mali's north back back into the desert and mountains near the Algeria border.

French troops have taken control of the airport in the northern Malian town of Kidal, the last rebel stronghold in the north.
(Reporting By Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Daniel Flynn)

Continuing the Look at the Class Divide in America's Major Cities - The Los Angeles Edition

I'm offering this series not as information to be simply accepted as 'a fact of our lives', but as Food for Thought. I hope my readers will find their neighborhood and reflect on this researcher's idea of their cities, and the demographics of class by types of employment. Much that I present here on the blog, is so we can peek into the minds of others, and be aware of how others choose to view, label and ultimately manipulate us. In today's world, new words are born daily, attached to bogus meanings, whose only purpose is to confuse and divert the public from the essence of 'what's really going on'. 

 If you don't agree with the thinking that this research is based upon, or don't feel that the scope has incorporated your perspective and information, I encourage you to make that known to the researchers. Information on the author of the study and his research group is provided at the end of the article. If you take a look at the list of major corporations that use his research, you'll notice that many of them are corporations that impact your life, or attempt to sell you products. I'm certain that he would be interested, as I am, in your comments, suggestions, disagreement and perspective on this material.

lovu, Kentke

Class-Divided Cities: Los Angeles Edition

Richard Florida
Jan 29, 2013


This is the second post in a series exploring the growing class divides across America's largest cities and metros. It examines the residential locations of today’s three major classes: the shrinking middle of blue-collar workers; the rising ranks of the knowledge, professional, and creative class; and the even larger and faster-growing ranks of lower-paid service workers, using detailed data from the American Community Survey. For a detailed description of methodology, see the first post in the series, on New York.

Again, I apologize that two google maps referred to here and below I was unable to copy for the post. Please visit the original website to see the areas referred to:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/01/class-divided-cities-los-angeles-edition/4296/#
The city of Los Angeles. (MPI's Zara Matheson)

The map above charts the geography of class for the city of Los Angeles; the second map, below, includes the pattern for the entire L.A. metro area. The creative class lives in the areas that are shaded in purple, the red areas are primarily service class, and the blue are working class. Each colored space on the map is a Census tract, a small area within a city or county that can be even smaller than a neighborhood. The maps are interactive: Click on a tract to see how its percentages for each of the three major classes.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/01/class-divided-cities-los-angeles-edition/4296/#
The Los Angeles metro area map. (MPI's Zara Matheson)

The creative class includes people who work in science and technology, business and management, arts, culture, media and entertainment, law, and healthcare professions. All told the class's ranks make up 34.1 percent of the Los Angeles metro area's workers, just slightly higher than the national average. These are high-skilled, highly educated workers who average $80,859 per year in wages in salaries, significantly more than the national average for these workers.

As the maps show, the creative class is quite highly concentrated in the city of Los Angeles and across the metro. There are 1,036 tracts (36.4 percent) with more than 40 percent of its residents are members of this class, 628 (22 percent) with more than 50 percent, 104 (3.6 percent) with more than two thirds, and 16 (0.6 percent) where the creative class makes up more than three-quarters of all residents.

In the city, there is a major creative class cluster stretching from Hollywood, Bel Air, and Westwood, where UCLA is located, to the beach community of Venice, and a small cluster near downtown, especially around USC. For the metro broadly, the creative class stretches out along the coast from Santa Monica, home to the RAND Corporation and Milken Institute to Malibu on the north; and, Manhattan Beach to Palos Verdes; south from Huntington Beach and Newport Beach to Irvine, home to the University of California, Irvine, Laguna Beach and Dana Point; as well Pasadena, home to Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The table below lists the 10 census tracts with the densest creative class concentrations. Many of these tracts include or are close to major universities, colleges and think tanks: Turtle Rock in Orange County (UC-Irvine); Westwood (UCLA), Pasadena (Caltech) and Santa Monica (RAND). Hollywood, not surprisingly, has a large creative class concentration, as does neighboring Los Feliz. Woodland Hills is something of an anomaly: Located in the Valley, it's highly suburban and does not offer proximity to research universities or other knowledge-based institutions.

Top 10 Creative Class Locations in the Los Angeles Metro

Neighborhood (Census Tract #) Creative Class Share

Turtle Rock/UC Irvine, Orange County (626.29) 84.3%

Laurel Canyon, Hollywood (1941.02) 79.5%

Woodland Hills (1375.04) 78.1%

Westwood (2651) 78.0%

North of Montana, Santa Monica (7012.01) 77.9%

South Pasadena (4635) 77.7%

Rancho Park, Palms (2693) 77.4%

Los Feliz (882.02) 76.7%

South Arroyo, Pasadena (4638) 76.6%

Cheviot Hills, Palms (2695) 76.0%

Metro Average 34.1%


The service class entails workers in low-wage, low-skill, routine service jobs such as food service and preparation, retail sales, clerical and administrative positions, and the like. This is the largest class of workers, making up 46.3 percent of the region's workers, just slightly beneath the national average. Service workers in the metro average $32,367 per year in wages and salaries. While this is considerably above the national average for these workers, it is just 40 percent of the wages of the metro's creative class workers. There are 859 (30.1 percent) tracts where the class makes up more than half of the residents, 25 (0.9 percent) where it is more than two-thirds, and four (0.1 percent) where it is more than three-quarters.

In the city, L.A.'s service class tends to reside on the periphery of the major creative class clusters in North Hollywood, further out in Reseda and in the neighborhoods between Hollywood and downtown. The same basic pattern holds for the metro with the service class pushed farther out. The map shows an enormous service class cluster bordering L.A.'s west end, Santa Monica and Pasadena, stretching all the way south to Anaheim and Santa Ana, and two additional big clusters in the metro's northern and northeastern corners.

The table below lists the top service class locations. These include farther out locations, but also two tracts each in Hollywood and Silver Lake, again showing how major service class areas often abut substantial creative class concentrations.

Top 10 Service Class Locations in the Los Angeles Metro

Neighborhood (Census Tract #) Service Class Share

Cal Poly Pomona (4024.04) 82.3%

USC, West Adams-Expo Park (2227) 79.5%

Bixby Village, Long Beach (5746.01) 79.4%

Park Mesa Heights, Crenshaw (2349.01) 78.3%

Silver Lake/Chinatown (2071.02) 74.9%

Silver Lake/Chinatown (2071.03) 71.5%

North Hollywood (1241.03) 71.1%

Hollywood Heights (1902.01) 69.0%

Cambodia Town, Long Beach (5764.01) 68.9%

Hollywood (1908.01) 68.8%

Metro Average 46.3%


The working class includes workers who work in factory jobs as well as those in transportation and construction. It comprises 19.5 percent of the region's workers (below the national average of 21 percent), who average $37,066 in wages and salaries, just slightly more than the national average, but less than half that of the region's creative class workers.



L.A.'s once thriving working class districts are disappearing. There are just 59 tracts (2.1 percent) where the working class makes up more than half of all workers. But there are 712 tracts (25 percent) where it is less than 10 percent of residents, and 256 (nine percent) where it is less than five percent.

Top 10 Working Class Locations in the Los Angeles Metro

Neighborhood (Census Tract #) Working Class Share

Westlake (2089.02) 69.9%

Whiteman Airport, Pacoima (1047.03) 65.0%

Central Alameda, South Park (2287.10) 62.9%

Pixley Park, Maywood (5333) 62.2%

El Monte (4333.02) 59.8%

Westlake (2084.01) 59.1%

Cudahy (5344.03) 58.9%

South Park (2240.10) 58.6%

Central Alemeda, South Park (2281) 58.2%

South Figueroa, South Park (2284.10) 57.3%

Metro Average 19.5%


Perhaps the most notable feature of the map is what is not there — a substantial working class presence. There are just a few smatterings of blue (indicating working class areas) around downtown, in the northeast near Burbank, and south in the Compton and Long Beach areas. South Park is an area in the more famous "South Central" ecosystem - not the rapidly gentrifying area near the convention center, which has co-opted the name. Cudahy is a strongly Latino area, its own city actually, on the east side of South Central near the 710 freeway. Westlake is a slowly gentrifying neighborhood between Koreatown and Downtown. As the maps show, L.A.'s once considerable manufacturing and working class areas have largely disappeared.

Following the pattern we saw in the first post in this series on New York, L.A. too is divided and segmented by class. But unlike New York's pattern, with its heavy creative class concentration at the core in Manhattan and surrounding parts of Brooklyn and Jersey City, L.A.'s creative class, much of which is no doubt affiliated with the film and television industry, is more spread out along the coast. That said, L.A.'s class geography does not conform to a typical urban-suburban pattern, with lower-wage service workers concentrated in the urban core and the more affluent creative class at the suburban fringe. The pattern of creative class clustering seen in New York does carry over but is expressed in different forms. There are creative class pockets in the city and its downtown as well as in coastal suburbs.

Patrick Adler, a Ph.D. candidate in urban planning at UCLA, points out that these creative clusters function as "anchors" of sorts which spread across multiple Census tracts, noting that they are a "striking regularity across the maps." He adds that "L.A.'s industry was never nearly as centralized as New York's. The variety of mechanisms that have led creatives 'back to the city' — that is back to where industrial and warehouse buildings are - have led to a more diffused kind of pattern." While powered by similar underlying mechanisms, L.A.'s ongoing transformation and gentrification takes shape around a more spread out pattern than in older Northeastern cities with their well-defined industrial cores. In this sense, he adds, "N.Y.'s Williamsburg and L.A.'s Venice are more similar than different" in their evolutionary role and function. The service class is clustered in broad swaths between and further beyond these creative class districts near downtown and further out in the suburban periphery. The region's shrinking working class is more tightly pocketed again in a mix of urban and suburban locations.

L.A.'s economic geography thus reflects the post-suburban segmentation and fracturing of metropolis along class lines, something I'll be writing more about in this series. Next week, I'll turn my attention to Chicago.



Prior posts in this series:
New York Edition

Richard Florida is Co-Founder and Editor at Large at The Atlantic Cities. He's also a Senior Editor at The Atlantic, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, and Global Research Professor at New York University. He is a frequent speaker to communities, business and professional organizations, and founder of the Creative Class Group, whose current client list can be found here. http://www.creativeclass.com/clients

U.N. Panel Says Israeli Settlement Policy Violates Law

The New York Times

January 31, 2013
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and ISABEL KERSHNER

GENEVA — Israel has pursued a creeping annexation of the Palestinian territories through the creation of Jewish settlements and committed multiple violations of international law, possibly including war crimes, a United Nations panel said Thursday, calling for an immediate halt to all settlement activity and the withdrawal of all settlers.

Presenting their findings in Geneva after a nearly six-month inquiry for the United Nations Human Rights Council, a panel of three judges, led by Christine Chanet of France, presented its view that Israel’s settlements violated the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit a state from transferring its own civilian population into territory it has occupied.

Asked if Israel’s actions constituted war crimes, Ms. Chanet replied that its offenses fell under Article 8 of the International Criminal Court statute. “Article 8 of the I.C.C. statute is the chapter of war crimes,” she said at a news conference. “That is the answer.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry quickly dismissed the report as “counterproductive and unfortunate” and said it provided a reminder of the Human Rights Council’s “systematically one-sided and biased approach towards Israel.”

Israel and the United States view the Human Rights Council, which answers to some nondemocratic member states, including Saudi Arabia, China and Cuba, that are themselves often scrutinized for human rights violations, as eager to shine a harsh spotlight on Israeli practices even though it overlooks egregious rights problems elsewhere. Israel has had repeated conflicts with the body and declined to cooperate with the panel’s fact-finding inquiry.

Israel “must cease all settlement activities without preconditions” and start withdrawing all settlers from the occupied territories, the judges said in their report, scheduled to be debated in the rights council in March.

The panel drew on 67 submissions from a cross section of academics, diplomats, Israeli civilian organizations and Palestinians, Ms. Chanet said. Because Israel decided not to cooperate with the investigators, they were unable to visit the West Bank and went instead to the Jordanian capital, Amman, to take testimony.

The council’s decision last March to investigate the effect of Jewish settlements on Palestinian rights prompted Israel to break off cooperation with the council, castigating it as a political platform used “to bash and demonize Israel.” The panel’s report came two days after Israel boycotted a council review of its human rights, becoming the first country to withhold cooperation from a process in which all 193 United Nations member states have previously engaged.

The United States has condemned Israel’s settlement policy as unhelpful and an obstacle to achieving a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue, but it also opposed the creation of the fact-finding mission, saying at the time that it was an example of the council’s bias against Israel, that it did not “advance the cause of peace” and that it would “distract the parties from efforts to resolve the issues that divide them.”

The panel noted that Israel had established about 250 Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, with a combined population now estimated at 520,000. It said the settler population was growing much faster than the population of Israel outside the settlements.

The report quotes the Israeli finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, as saying in November that the government had doubled the budget for West Bank settlements “in a low-key way because we didn’t want parties in Israel or abroad to thwart the move.”

These actions fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, the panel said, and if a future Palestinian state ratified the Rome Statute, which created the court, Israel could be called to account for “gross violations of human rights law and serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

The report was welcomed by Palestinian officials and some settlement opponents in Israel. Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said in a statement that the report documented “illegal Israeli practices without any ambiguity.”

Israeli officials, on the other hand, dismissed the report, saying that the only way to resolve the settlement issue was through direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without preconditions.

Yigal Palmor, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that the council “systematically gives Israel a raw deal” and that the report’s conclusions were predictable. Defending Israel’s decision not to cooperate with the fact-finding mission, Mr. Palmor said, “If the cards are marked, are we expected to play anyway?”

He criticized the report for mentioning Israel’s unilateral evacuation of 21 settlements in Gaza and 4 in the northern West Bank in 2005 “in passing in a few lines, as an insignificant detail, although it was a very major event for Israel.”

“It adds insult to injury,” he said.

The report did not explicitly call for an economic boycott of the settlements or sanctions against Israel, but Israel said its authors deliberately used language that could serve groups calling for such measures.

Frances Raday, an Israeli law professor and a human rights advocate, told Israeli television that the report “gives unusual encouragement to attempts that already exist to boycott settlements and Israeli institutions and Israel as a state because of the settlements.”

According to the report, Palestinians’ rights to freedom of movement and expression and their access to places of worship, education, water, housing and natural resources “are being violated consistently.”

The settlements are maintained through “a system of total segregation” between the settlers, who enjoy a preferential legal status, and the rest of the population, the report concludes. The settlements have resulted in the creation of legal zones in which settlers are subject to Israeli laws but Palestinians come under a patchwork of military orders and laws dating back to Ottoman and British rule, the report says.

In July, an Israeli government-appointed commission of legal experts published a report saying Israel’s presence in the West Bank was not occupation and recommending that the state approve scores of unauthorized Jewish settlement outposts there.

The three-member commission, led by Edmund Levy, a retired Israeli Supreme Court justice, confirmed a position long held by Israel: that the territories are not occupied, since Jordan’s previous hold over them was never internationally recognized, and that their fate must be determined in negotiations. Still, fearing international censure, among other things, Israel’s government has not formally adopted the commission’s conclusions.

Nick Cumming-Bruce reported from Geneva, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.