Today’s photo of the day shows Whitney Houston and her daughter Bobbi Kristina at a recent awards show. Isn’t it great to see her so healthy and happy?

Today’s video of the day offers a spoof of a certain famous Black intellectual as he analyzes the current presidential pool. It’s kinda funny!

Twice upon a time there was a boy who died
Lived happily ever after but that's another chapter
Live from, home of the brave with dirty dollars
Beauty parlors, baby bottles, & bowling ball Impalas
Street schola's that's majoring in culinary arts
You know... how to work bread cheese & dough
From scratch but see the catch is you can get caught
Know what ya sellin' what ya bought so cut that big talk
Let's walk to the bridge now meet me halfway
Now you may see some children dead off in the pathway
It's them poor babies walkin' slowly to the candy lady
It's lookin' bad need some hope
Like the words maybe, if, or probably more than a hobby
When my turntables get wobbly they don't fall
I'm sorry y'all I often drift I'm talkin' gifts
So when it comes you never look the horse inside it's grill
Of course you know I feel like the bearer of bad news
Don't want to be it but it's needed so what have you
Now question is every nigga with dreads for the cause?
Is every nigga with golds for the fall? Naw
So don't get caught up in appearance
it's Outkast Aquemini another Black experience Okay

On Sunday, thousands of men will gather at Temple University’s Liacouras Center as part of the new “10,000 Men” initiative. The program, offered in response to Philadelphia’s rising homicide rate, will train a predominately African American group of men as “Peacemakers” who will enter “designated communities and deter unwanted and illegal behavior.”

In many ways, I am encouraged by the renewed commitment to protecting our own communities. As opposed to Mayor John Street’s “Safe Streets” initiative, which attempted to transform the ‘hood into a de facto police state, 10,000 Men wisely recognizes the benefits of community involvement. In addition to offering us a much-needed dose of responsibility, the initiative provides a tangible alternative to armchair activism and sideline complaining. After all, how can we complain about senseless violence and police incompetence if we are unwilling to come up with a reasonable alternative?

The problem is that this strategy is far from reasonable.

If we’ve learned nothing from the historic Million Man March –where African American men became the first group of people to launch a protest march against themselves– we found out that the government and mainstream Americans will never stop large numbers of Negroes from confessing their collective sins in full public view. The problem is that, instead of inspiring policymakers to support our efforts, such actions reinforce the absurd notion that violence and poverty can be eliminated by embracing a gospel of individual responsibility. In this case, by agreeing to “take back our neighborhoods” we concede the point that we lost them solely due to our own personal failings.

The last time I checked, joblessness and crack had something to do with it too.

Rather than demanding higher wages, better schools, and stricter gun laws, the current plan absolves the government of its responsibility to protect our most vulnerable  citizens. For example, even if we are to accept the quixotic idea that ten thousand unarmed civilians can make peace within inner-city war zones, couldn’t we expect even greater results from ten thousand trained officers? Unfortunately, the current initiative makes no such demands from the State.

Of course, this doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. There is no reason why African American men (and women!) cannot take control of their communities and fight for social justice at the same time. Unfortunately, I have yet to hear how breeding newschool Guardian Angels will produce political education, protest, or even voter registration. Until we focus on these and other issues, even ten million men won’t help us.

Doubting Thomas
By Mark Anthony Neal 

When Ntozake Shange and Michele Wallace published their respective manifestos for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman in the 1970s they sparked public debates about the state of relations between black men and women. Waged largely in artistic and intellectual circles—Ms. Magazine, for example published early excerpts of Wallace’s book—the debates were beyond the gaze of most White Americans. Mainstream America fully confronted the gender tensions within Black America in the autumn of 1991 as Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment in the workplace in the midst of his confirmation hearings.

As political conservatives who were presumed marginal to the political views of large segments of Black America, Thomas and his accuser Anita Hill, were unlikely characters in the on-going dramas between black women and men. With the confirmation hearings being broadcast in real-time, the debates seemed to project stigmas of deviance on relations between black men and women as if these dynamics were unique to black people. This sense of deviance was underwritten by centuries old racist truisms about black male sexuality—Thomas’s apparent sexual appetite—and black female culpability via Hill’s presumed political (gold-digging) ambitions.

Thomas, sensing the new technological terrain in which the drama unfolded, famously bore witness to the uniqueness of the moment with his claim that so-called “left wing” attacks on him were representative of a high-tech lynching. While Thomas’s language, with its clear reference to Jim Crow-era justice, helped congeal the now popular notion of “playing the race card,” his move came at the expense of the real issues that women—and black women in particular—have faced in the workplace. Thus it is ironic that 16 years later, Thomas revisits the drama of those hearings, just as another Thomas—Isiah—is found guilty of sexual harassment of another black woman.

George H. Bush’s decision to nominate Thomas—at best a second tier federal judge—as a replacement for the retired Thurgood Marshall, was one of his few moments of political brilliance. The Bush administration anticipated that race pride—or more specifically “race man” pride—would provide the political cover needed to facilitate what was clearly going to be a difficult and controversial appointment. As African American Women in Defense of Ourselves observed at the time of Thomas’s confirmation hearing, there was the impression that black communities were willing to “tolerate both the dismantling of affirmative action and the evil of sexual harassment in order to have any Black man on the Supreme Court”

For the rest of the story, click here.