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Hurricane Sandy: Focus on People, Not Property
In an illuminating piece at Ebony, contributor R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy says that conditions in the wake of Hurricane Sandy should remind us that the combination of natural disasters and socially engineered poverty creates a damning situation for many. Hurricane Sandy hit the Eastern seaboard and New York City very hard. We must not just focus on…
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We Must Teach Kids About Prison
R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy writes eloquently in Ebony that blacks must engage young people in open and honest discussions about prison in order to help them avoid getting ensnared in the life. Sadly, the United States has become the leader of incarceration in the world and it is incarceration that is undoing the sanctity of our communities. not books.…
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Change NY With the Stop-and-Frisk Phone App
R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy says in Ebony that the New York City Police Department’s policy of stop and frisk won’t stop until people across the city participate in changing the status quo. Fortunately, the New York Civil Liberties Union has launched a mobile phone application that allows people to do just that by recording stop-and-frisk activity…
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Poor, Gifted and Black
If we let Forbes writer Gene Marks tell it, it’s easy to make it out of poverty and into prosperity. Step 1: Grab your bootstraps. Step 2: Pull really hard. Voilà! You are now on the fast track out of being lodged in under-resourced neighborhoods and schools and one step closer to the American dream.…
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Obama Must Push for True Education Reform
With the debt ceiling behind him, President Obama remains saddled with a massive task that may not get as much attention as the economy but is the basis for it: reforming education. Over the past two years, Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have managed not to offer key leadership in the rewriting of…
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Waiting for School Reform
Education reform is a hot topic these days, thanks to the recent release of the much hyped documentary Waiting for Superman. Directed by the same team that produced the award-winning An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary takes a hard look at the dilemma of American educational failure. Viewers get a heart-tugging tour de force that spotlights…
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Black Men and Gender Privilege
I recently traveled abroad to the Dominican Republic with some of my closest male friends. Before I left, I read Don’t Blame it on Rio: The Real Deal Behind Why Men Go to Brazil for Sex by Jewel Woods and Karen Hunter. At the time I read it, I took some of the accounts in…
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Is College for You?
By this time of year, most students have ended their semester of fretting about whether they will or will not be accepted to this or that college. They have spent the past few months greeting the mailbox with a mixture of fear and hope. Those who received disappointing responses may now be joining the ranks…
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Please Leave it Behind
Enough, I get it already! Hillary is different than Bush. Barack is different than Bush. At the risk of sounding outright crazy, I think they both need to be more like Bush — for the sake of our children. Let me explain. Less than 12 months into office, President George W. Bush pushed in the…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
