A recent event held by the National Federation of Republican Women. in South Carolina last weekend seems to tell the story of how South Carolina Republican leadership is willing to have the South depicted.

The event was titled “The Southern Experience”. Costumes from the Civil war era were a highlight of the evening. An African-American man and woman dressed as slaves were also part of the festivities. In 2010, the Republican Party of South Carolina has Blacks dressed as slaves as part of the entertainment.

The invited speakers included Michael Steele, Gov Mark Sanford and Nikki Haley. I cannot confirm if any of the speakers actually showed up. I can say that the South Carolina state Senate President, Glenn McConnell was an eager participant in full Civil war drag having his photo taken with the two “slaves”.

The GOP frequently goes out of the way to offend minorities to gain favor with the fringes of the White voting public. The GOP makes it a very easy decision for African-American voters to reject the Republican Party outright.

A link with pictures follows. http://www.jackandjillpolitics.com/2010/09/how-leading-republicans-boehner-steele-mcconnell-party-with-black-people-dressed-as-slaves/

This crap has to be spotlighted and national Republican leadership has to condemn the message sent by this spectacle.

The Senate voted to strip the $1.2 billion owed Black farmers out of a supplemental war funding bill. The black farmers who were discriminated against in receiving USDA loans continue to be denied copmesnation by the government of the United States.

The Nay votes are votes against keeping the Black farmers steelement in the bill.

 

Grouped By Vote Position

YEAs ---46
Akaka (D-HI) Baucus (D-MT) Bingaman (D-NM) Boxer (D-CA) Brown (D-OH) Burris (D-IL) Cantwell (D-WA) Cardin (D-MD) Casey (D-PA) Conrad (D-ND) Dodd (D-CT) Dorgan (D-ND) Durbin (D-IL) Feingold (D-WI) Feinstein (D-CA) Franken (D-MN)	Gillibrand (D-NY) Goodwin (D-WV) Hagan (D-NC) Harkin (D-IA) Inouye (D-HI) Johnson (D-SD) Kaufman (D-DE) Kerry (D-MA) Klobuchar (D-MN) Kohl (D-WI) Lautenberg (D-NJ) Levin (D-MI) Lincoln (D-AR) Menendez (D-NJ) Merkley (D-OR) Mikulski (D-MD)	Murray (D-WA) Nelson (D-FL) Nelson (D-NE) Reed (D-RI) Reid (D-NV) Rockefeller (D-WV) Sanders (I-VT) Schumer (D-NY) Shaheen (D-NH) Stabenow (D-MI) Tester (D-MT) Udall (D-NM) Whitehouse (D-RI) Wyden (D-OR)

NAYs ---51
Alexander (R-TN) Barrasso (R-WY) Bayh (D-IN) Begich (D-AK) Bennet (D-CO) Bennett (R-UT) Brown (R-MA) Brownback (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY) Burr (R-NC) Carper (D-DE) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Collins (R-ME) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX)	Crapo (R-ID) Ensign (R-NV) Enzi (R-WY) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Gregg (R-NH) Hatch (R-UT) Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Johanns (R-NE) Kyl (R-AZ) Landrieu (D-LA) LeMieux (R-FL) Lieberman (ID-CT) Lugar (R-IN) McCain (R-AZ)	McCaskill (D-MO) McConnell (R-KY) Murkowski (R-AK) Pryor (D-AR) Risch (R-ID) Roberts (R-KS) Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Snowe (R-ME) Specter (D-PA) Thune (R-SD) Udall (D-CO) Vitter (R-LA) Voinovich (R-OH) Warner (D-VA) Webb (D-VA) Wicker (R-MS)

Not Voting - 3
Bond (R-MO) ......Democrats Bayh, Carper, Landrieu,, McCaskill, Pyor, Spector , Udall  and Webb cast Nay votes.   Even the Democratic Nelsons supported the payout.   No Republican supported the payment of the money that the black famers were owed	DeMint (R-SC)	Leahy (D-VT)

Shirley Sherrod used a tale of Christian redemption to explain how she could overcome the hatred she felt after her father was murdered by a White farmer, and the unequal treatment she witnessed in Black farmers getting farm loans from the USDA and still deliver heart felt care to a White farmer in need. Add a pulpit and some organ music and you could have a stirring church sermon.

African-American and Latino Democrats tend to be much more religious than many of their White counterparts in the party. Polling suggests that 30-40% of the Democratic Party is African-American or Latino. how will the party deal with larger percentages of religious people interacting with people who are atheist or have a strong belief in the separation of church and state?

When one reads comments from Progressives about people who believe in a higher power, one often senses open hostility. Watch Bill Mahrer when the subject turns to religion, and you tend to see the same facial contortions that we see when Breitbart and Limbaugh have when they discuss issues of race. Mahrer dislike Christianity and ridicule Christians. Breitbart and Limbaugh dislkie most Black leadrs and feel free to ridicule Blacks.

The NAACP rustled the bushes and the snakes came slithering out. Soon after the NAACP request that the Tea Party speak out against the racists in their ranks, we got the Williams "Abraham Lincoln parody letter". Breitbart's purposefully truncated video snippet of Shirley Sherrod quickly followed. The NAACP spoke truth to power, even though the organization behaved in a cowardly fashion when Breitbart and Fox gave them some pushback. The NAACP swiftly apologized and admitted to being snookered.

Sherrod accepted the NAACP apology because that is part of her Christian faith. The NAACP also has a strong religious background and you can often hear church organ playing during national conventions. The organ is used to emphasize certain parts of a speaker's talk ,just like in church.

It will be interesting to see how the influx of more minorities with religious beliefs impacts how Progressives deal with religion. Can we all get along?

If you love Shirley Sherrod's response to the Fox and Breitbart, then at least try to coexist with the Christian ethic that got her through her ordeal and led to her forgiving heart.

Kellie Terrell the news editor for an HIV/AIDS website The Body the increased incidence of HIV infections in the African-American community is being blamed on the The Down Low. The linked article appears at the Root website. For those out of the loop, the Down Low (DL) is the practice of men who are in relationships with women to engage in homosexual sex in private. The late African American author Everett Lynn Harris (06/20/1955-07/23/2009) depicted the DL in his novels. Harris had ten novels make the New York Times best seller list. The New York Times reported on the DL in 2003. The sneaky Gay Black male reached prime time.

A Law & Order Special Victims Unit episode titled "Lowdown" " was televised on 04/06/2004 detailing the story of a prosecutor who commits murder to prevent a colleague from exposing the prosecutor's homosexuality. Oprah Winfrey had JL King on as one of her Book club promotions to showcase King's book "On The Down Low". Terry McMillan, the best selling author of "Waiting to Exhale", told her ex-husband that he was " a little fag" after he told her that he was gay. In 2007, McMillan filed a $40 million against the ex-husband, Jonathan Plummer, for conspiracy to damage her reputation. She wrote an essay, "100 Questions I Meant to Ask Him," in the anthology The Honeymoon's Over, which includes questions like "Have you been surprised by the promiscuous behavior of a lot of gay men? Are you going to be like this or are you already?" Mc Millan notes: "If you criticize them, you're automatically a homophobe," she said. "I'm starting to think they're heterophobes." The story is ready to be related by any beautician serving the African-American community at a moment's notice. In barbershops, the story reinforces the idea for straight males that Gay men are the reason for the AIDS problem.

A CNN segment on October 31.2009, anchored by Don Lemon, hosting a panel consisting of Essence magazine editor, Angela Burt-Murray, and a a group of straight Black men laid the AIDS epidemic in the Black community on the Down Low. Burt-Murray's solution was for the Black community was for the Black community to decrease it's homophobia and allow Gay Black men to be able to be more open about their sexuality> While this may be true, it still supports the idea that Black Gay males are a problem.

It is hardly surprising then that on a recent stint as the guest host on "The View", comedian DL Hughley added the following to a discussion of the FDA's ban on blood donations by gay and bisexual men by stating, "They are getting it from men who are on the down low." View co-host Sherri Shepherd replied, "The down low is African-American men who have sex with men and then have sex with their girlfriends -- or their wives. They're husbands, as well. It's very prevalent in the African-American community. Very!"

For a heterosexual African-American male, the identification of Gay Black men as the "source" of the HIV/AIDS problem in the Black community sends a message that you have no role in the AIDS epidemic. Gay Black males are the problem, you are bear no responsibility. You are justified in taking offense when your partner suggests that you use a condom. Is the woman is actually accusing you of being on the Down Low?! To protect your manhood you must demand that no cover be used. For women, unless your man is suspect, there is no need to take precautions.

As with many things taken as truth in society, Gay African-American males are not the critical source of the AIDS epidemic in the Black community. Gay Black males are being scape-goated and heterosexual Black males are placing themselves in danger if they become complacent. The available science does not suggest the DL as a major factor in the AIDS epidemic.

Dr Chandra Ford of the School of Public Health at UCLA has found no evidence to support the idea that the DL is a prime factor in an article published in the Annals of Epidemiology in March 2007. Ford proposes that the depiction of Gay Black men as predatory is merely an extension of sexual depictions of all Black men as being over-sexed and aggressive. She found no evidence that the DL could explain the high incidence of AIDS in the Black community. Condom use needs to be emphasized.

Here is an interview with Dr Kevin Felton, director of the CDC's National Institute of HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention being interviewed by Michele Martin of NPR on October 31, 2009.

MICHEL MARTIN, host: I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Coming up, with World Series fever in the air, we check in on one effort to find new baseball talent in an unlikely place. How about India? We'll meet the winner of the reality show the "Million Dollar Arm." That's in just a few minutes. But first, on a very different note, we want to spend a few minutes talking about the alarming HIV and AIDS infection rates in the black community. And as you might imagine, some of our conversation over the next few minutes might not be appropriate for younger or more sensitive listeners. So please be advised. African-Americans who make up only 12 percent of the U.S. population are nearly half of the people with HIV. And African-Americans make up 61 percent of the new HIV cases among all women and most of them contract the virus through heterosexual contact. For years, the suspicion has been that many of those infected women are contracting the disease through sex with men on the down-low, men who don't tell their female partners about their sexual activities with other men. Well, a slew of new studies show that just isn't the case. With us to talk about this is Dr. Kevin Fenton of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is the director of the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention. Well, that's certainly a mouthful, doctor. Welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. KEVIN FENTON (Director, National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention): Thank you so much, Michel.

MARTIN: How did this series of studies come about? Was it partly because this whole down low question had become so much a part of the popular culture that researchers felt that they needed to pin it down?

Dr. FENTON: Indeed. You know, what we're seeing now is that we're in the midst of a crisis as far as HIV in the African-American community is concerned. And it really is important that we understand why the infection is spreading and where the infection is spreading within the community, so we can take effective action. And part of the response must be to address some of the myths and misinformation regarding how HIV is being transmitted within the community.

MARTIN: And what is the major finding that you would want us to know about?

Dr. FENTON: It's critically important to know that we're dealing with a very complex epidemic, certainly among the black community. And black women are bearing a disproportionate burden of disease compared with their white or Hispanic counterparts. It's also important to realize that about one in five black women become infected because of injecting drugs. And about 80 percent of women acquire the infection through sexual transmission from male partners who are HIV infected. And their male partners may become infected either through injecting drugs themselves, through having multiple sexual partners or a smaller proportion through male bisexual activity. So it's important to understand the range of risk factors which occur in heterosexual transmission of HIV in the United States.

MARTIN: So, is it fair to say that it is just simply not true that the majority of new infections among black women occur because of having sex with men who have sex with men.

Dr. FENTON: Yes, that would be true. It is crucially important to bear in mind that there are a range of risk factors which face black women in the United States today. And, you know, the reality is that bisexual black men account for a very, very small proportion of the overall black male population in the United States. Our research suggests that about two percent of black men will report being bisexually active. And, therefore, you need to look at the risk factors which are far more prevalent in the community - having multiple sexual partners with unprotected sex with heterosexual partners, injecting drugs. Those are going to be factors which are far more prevalent in the population and are driving risks.

MARTIN: But, you know, you mentioned though that a lot of this is based on self-reporting. You're saying that a very small percentage of African-American men identify themselves as bisexual. The CDC itself has reported that many black men who report having sex with other men see themselves as heterosexual, even though their behavior may be at variance with how they identify themselves. Could it be a factor in the transmission of the disease because men don't necessarily accept or disclose to researchers or to their partners that they're engaging in this behavior?

Dr. FENTON: Indeed. And, you know, this factor of nondisclosure of this sort of diversity in sexual attitudes or lifestyles is certainly seen across all racial and ethnic groups. So you wouldn't want to say that this is something which unique to the black male community. And what our research also suggests is that even among men who are bisexually active, the bisexual males who have no other risk factors, for example, like injecting drugs, actually report having lower risk sexual behaviors than gay and bisexual men. So it's a very complex picture, and one that we're really trying to do more research to understand and to describe and to characterize. But even these early findings are helping us to challenge some of the preconceived ideas about how infections are being transmitted and among whom.

MARTIN: One factor that is not much discussed in the studies that we've talked about is the whole question of the incarceration rate. Men who may be incarcerated may be having sexual activity but that doesn't - they don't see themselves as anything other than heterosexual. It may be coerced. There may be some continuum of consent here that, you know, might be hard to talk about. But is that a factor also?

Dr. FENTON: You know, I'm so glad you raised that. Incarceration is certainly one of the topics and areas that we're particularly focused on at CDC to better understand both the disproportionate impact of this factor on the black community and how it facilitates HIV transmission. And there are a few things that we do know. First of all, although there is HIV transmission ongoing in prisons, it's not at high a level as had been previously thought. And what we actually believe is occurring is that there are a number of HIV-infected individuals who become incarcerated. So HIV goes from the community into the prison sector. There may be some onward transmission in prison. But the real factor that occurs is on release from prison, people who are at high risk or HIV infected reenter communities, form new sexual partnerships and that's where the potential for onward transmission of HIV occurs. Incarceration also has another key effect on the community, and that is by removing eligible African-American males from the community. It means that African-American women who are looking for African-American male partners have fewer choices in their sexual partnerships and relationships and may be forced into relationships where they have multiple partners or males who will have multiple female partners, etc. Or those women may not be able to negotiate safer sex and protected behaviors because of fear of losing eligible male partners in the community. So it's a very complex set of and series of factors which we observed with incarceration and the community transmission of HIV.

MARTIN: Dr. Kevin Fenton is the director of the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was kind enough to join us from his office in Atlanta. Dr. Fenton, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Dr. FENTON: Thank you so much.

Internalizing the misconception that Gay males are the problem and that straight Black men have no skin in the game, so to speak, creates a serious public health problem for the African-American community. African-Americans need to act based on fact. A sexual partners pattern of multiple sex partners and use of intravenous drugs are the big risk factors. Gay Black males are the least of the problem

The White House invited Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, Eugene Robinson of WaPo, Gail Collins of the NYT and Gene Seib of the WSJ to a luncheon 6 days ago. . The White House also conducts conference calls with bloggers like John Amato of Crooks & Liars and Sam Stein of Huffington Post

Last Friday the White House met with 60 mostly African-American minority bloggers from small websites representing the long tail of the internet. The websites individually are small, but collectively reach a wide audience.

The meeting took place while the bloggers were in town for the annual Bogging While Brown conference founded by Gail McCauley who runs the website whataboutourdaughters.com. The White House meeting was arranged by Cheryl Contee of the Jack and Jill Politics website. The meeting is the first step in gaining clout for minority voices on the web. Organizing is important to insure that issues like the unequal burden of housing foreclosures in minority communities, the plight of minority fishermen in the Gulf, and the still unpaid legal settlement to Black farmers are not forgotten.

In addition with the all out attack on minority Liberal and Progressive groups by Conservatives, organization becomes even more important. There was no rapid response with clout to support Van Jones. ACORN was taken out with the aid of those in the MSM despite the fact that the GAO found no pattern of wrongdoing in spending funds by ACORN.

We are all in the battle together, but there are some issues that impact African-Americans earlier than most other groups and require organized opposition. Hopefully this meeting will provide the beginnings of a mechanism to create this force.

I've never been a big fan of poetry, but this poem speaks volume to me. It is accompanied by a statement about the poet's view of how water is generally taken for granted. The poet, Evie Shockley is an African-American literature and creative writing professor at Rutgers.

 

ATLANTIS MADE EASY by Evie Shockley

atlantis made easy

orange was the color of her address, then blue silt : : whiskey burned brown down the street, then a dangerous drink whirled around a paper umbrella : : intoxication blue across the porch then rose in the attic : : bloated tuesday taught us, she's never been dry and never will be : : brass, bass, ivory, skins : : i hate to see that ninth ward wall go down : : army corpse engineers ran a 'train on her : : aw chere : : sweet ghost, saturated, deserted : : teething ground for the expected spectre, we knew it'd show up better late (against a black backdrop), whenever : : wait in the water, wait in the water, children : : stub your soul on a granite memory, a marble key change, an indigo mood : : trouble (the water)

-Evie Shockley

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Statement

Many of us think of water as a bountiful, endlessly renewable natural resource.  Those who live in desert climates tell a different story--and those who live with the less beneficent consequences of water's abundance, a different one yet.  But the big picture requires a less geocentric view.  In the universe, as far as our science can tell us, liquid water is, not plentiful, but rare.  Our biosphere, this earth, is the only place we currently know water to exist in usable form, as a surface liquid.  Water is essential to supporting life as we know it.  If we destroy the earth's hydrosphere, if we destabilize the system that recycles and redistributes our water, we destabilize and ultimately destroy the biosphere.  We often speak of poetry as an art form that documents and interrogates what it means to be alive.  Water is as much a part of that story--is as necessary, as complicated, as fragile--as love.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Evie Shockley is the author of two poetry collections, a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006) and the new black (forthcoming, Wesleyan University Press), as well as two chapbooks, 31 words * prose poems (2007) and The Gorgon Goddess (2001). Her poetry also appears widely in journals and anthologies, recently including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. She co-edits jubilat and teaches African American literature and creative writing (poetry) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/atlantis-made-easy-by-evie-shockley/

 

Actually, I was channel surfing this morning and stopped at "Morning Joe". Scarborough, Mika and Chuck Todd were discussing the Blanche Lincoln victory in Arkansas. They noted that "everyone" had predicted that Lincoln would lose by 5 points. The conversation suggested that they had predicted that the anti-incumbency fever in the country would drive Lincoln out of office.

Since Lincoln  won,, Joe now opined that Arkansas voters were telling Labor and other Washington insiders that they were not going to let Washington determine who Arkansas would send to he Senate.

None of the triad reflected on the fact that their prediction of a Lincoln loss was wrong or asked where their analysis had fallen off the tracks. They just went from one opinion to the next without noting the error.

They also failed to note that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton had supported Blanche Lincoln in the contest. I seem to remember that both Obama and Clinton have some connection with Washington, D.C. Admittedly, I did not stick around for the ful segment so they may have addressed the mental disconnect at some point. My snippet view of the three newsies left me unimpressed.

Much of televised news seems to be a great deal of blather with no actual content.

If Wall Street wizards can earn bonuses from losing other people's money and requiring a bailout, does it not follow that Tony Hayward will earn a bonus for being in charge of the biggest oil spurt in history.

The poor man has to endure not having his life back because he has to appear to be working hard to control this man-made disaster. Hayward can't even be certain that the Gulf Coast seafood he would consume is sfe. Food is probably being flown in. Perhaps he;s sticking to beef  and lamb.

The board has to reward Hayward's sacrifice

The restaurant owner refuses to serve the family. The parents tired from the stresses and strains of everyday life, refuse to be humiliated by the racist hick owner of the restaurant. The parents give their children an example of how to deal with adversity by refusing to leave the establishment. They calmly inform all present that anyone who lays a hand on them will be charged with assault.

If the owner calls local law enforcement, the owner is requesting that the agents of the government support racism.The Libertarian would want government sanctioned racism to be the law of the land.

This is a follow up question to one on racism that I posted earlier.

Do young people in the United States see "race" as important?

Would Martin Luther King Jr feel that the youth have achieved his dream of being judged by the content of character and not color of skin?

In discussions of race at TPM, the dialog begins and ends with whites stating that race should not be important. There may be a suggestion that Obama has done little to direct attention to problems in the Black community and that the administration should be attending to a "Black Agenda". The Black agenda is never really defined.

I have often wondered if people actually have discussions about race, and whether Blacks and Latinos openly discuss racial issues with Whites.

If you can indulge my curiosity, I would like to pose the following question:

"Outside of the criminal justice system, can you think of any institution(s) that continue systemic practices that lead to differences in outcomes based on race?"

The institutions can be public or private.

Australians have a healthy attitude towards their origins as many are proud to refer to themselves as prison stock. There is pride in the fact that they have built a thriving society from beginnings of people who were released from prison to colonize Australia. Here in the United States there are attempts to rationalize bad behavior rather than accept that despite the immorality that was present in our ancestors, a thriving society was created. Despite the birth defect of slavery, the United States has tried to become a land of equal opportunity.

Slavery was an abomination. Using the argument of state's rights to justify the capture and sale of other human beings cannot be validated. There was a great deal of money to be made on both sides of the Atlantic by the slave trade. Europeans made money from slavery. Americans made money from slavery. Africans made money from Slavery.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr an African-American historian at Harvard edited "Africana" , an encyclopedia entitled Africa which devotes chapters to the African involvement in the slave trade.

Gates has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times notes that there were several slave-trading kingdoms in western and central Africa. The Akan of Ghana (called Assante duing the days of slavery), the Fon of Benin (formerly Dahomey) , the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today;s Congo were all involved in slave trading. About 90% of those sold into slavery were captured and sold to Europeans by Africans.

African-Americans knew of the involvement of Africans in the slave trade . Frederick Douglas used that knowledge to argue against repatriation programs. "The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia," Douglas noted. "We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it."

Douglas is stating the position of the African-American. We are here in the United States. African-Americans are tied to Africa in memory, but we will fight for recognition in our country the US of A.

African leaders have recognized the culpability of their native lands. In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans' forgiveness for the "shameful" and "abominable" role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou's bold example.

Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the
Trans Atlantic Slave-Trade Database directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.

Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks' ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.

The sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.

Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo's ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.

African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.

** The African involvement in slavery may be painful for African-Americans to accept, but the facts speak for themselves. The difference for most Blacks is that they cannot track their lineage back to make more than a remote connection to a person who sold slaves. The family connections to slave traders may be closer for some whites, as noted in the book "Slaves In The Family".

We need to accept what was done in the past and rejoice in the progress that has been made. We do not need to celebrate the economic ingenuity of the heads of former African Kingdoms by celebrating African Trading Ingenuity Month. Neither do we need to celebrate the perpetuation of slavery in the United States.

Learn from the past and move on.

RNC chair Michael Steele is not noted for lucidity and honesty in most of his speaking engagements. Steele did have a moment of clarity Tuesday night when addressing a diverse group of students at DePaul University. According to The Chicago Sun-Times ,Steele made the following statement when assessing the relationship between the GOP and the African-American community:

**Why should an African-American vote Republican?

"You really don't have a reason to, to be honest -- we haven't done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True," Republican National Chairman Michael Steele told 200 DePaul University students Tuesday night.

"For the last 40-plus years we had a 'Southern Strategy' that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, 'Bubba' went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton."**

The statement indicates that Steele recognizes that the Black community has been ignored by the GOP.

Conservative African-American websites like Hip-Hop Republican and Booker Rising tend to respond to a late breaking story the following day.

Red State , on the other hand, had no problem issuing a rapid response.

**Michael Steele, the wonderful Chairman of the Republican National Committee who takes between $8,00-20,000 to give a speech, has decided to denigrate the party and make the GOP out to be a bunch of racist hicks.

RINO's like Steele will always be traitors to the party. How can Steele, a politician from Maryland (which went for Obama by a 62%-38% margin), be anything other than a RINO? RINOs have no loyalty to anything other than their own aggrandizement and will turn on the party the second they think it will suit their purposes (see: Crist). Steele would be much more comfortable in the Democratic party - after all, he thinks the GOP has nothing to offer blacks (which is far from the truth - the GOP just has nothing to offer race baiters, traitors and those who hold our Constitution in contempt; for any black person who holds life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness dear in his or her heart, the GOP has much to offer). Ours is a party that is based on principals held with conviction, not the amount of melanin one has in their epidermis.

As conservatives gain ascendancy within the party, Steele will eventually get the heave-ho, the only question is whether he flames out before or after November 2010. My guess is that after he is booted from the job, after doing as much damage as he can, he will join the Democratic party and write some agitprop book railing at the GOP as a racist cabal and that he is a martyr in the march for civil rights and the MMS will eat-it-up like Rosie O'Donnell in a bon-bon factory because it conforms to the hallucinated worldview created by their liberal delirium.**

One can readily expect the response from Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin. It will be interesting to see the reaction of Senate and House Republican leadership and rank and file to Steele's assertion.

This is going to be interesting .

Some southerners are concerned that the South is looked down on by the rest of the country.

One way the South can regain some credibility is to direct people to the crazy folks in Arizona. The South can't come close to the craziness in that state.

Arizona State University was the institution that refused to award an honorary degree to Barack Obama because the President hadn't done enough with his life to earn an honorary degree from the party school.

Now Arizona legislators want citizens to carry around papers to document that they belong in the country. The legislators also want Presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to be placed on the ballot. The proposal is so outrageous that one Arizona Congressman, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) thinks the state should be boycotted until the legislators regain their common sense.

If enough Southerners can get family and friends to direct people's attention to Arizona, the South can get some relief from the grief.

Litigation known as the "Pigford Case" established a longstanding pattern of racial bias in giving out loans to farmers by the United States Department of Agriculture. The case dates back to 1997. A federal judge awarded the farmers involved $50K each. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said that in addition the farmers could receive up to $250K in actual damages.

In February, a settlement of $1 billion was announced. Up to 80K Black farmers could receive funds. Congress has not allocated funds to pay the settlement. There was a deadline of March 31 set at the time of the February announcement. A meeting at the White House on April 14th did not result in concrete solutions.

There is a possibility of some farmers may withdraw from the government settlement to pursue independent lawsuits which could lengthen the process even further.

The Black farmers are just one minority group that was short-changed by the lending practices of The Department of Agriculture, Latino and Native American farmers also have discrimination lawsuits pending because of the loan practices.

Congress and the White House need to live up to their financial responsibilities. The original lawsuit brought by the Black farmers dates back to the 1980s. This supposed to have been over on March 31st.