Today’s photo of the day shows Scott McClellan’s latest book, What Happened, in which the former White House Press Secretary dishes dirt on the Bush Administration. From what I hear, this is gonna get ugly!

Today’s video of the day is a hip-hop classic! Even DC can’t hate on this one!!!!

The Culture of Policing Must Change
Matthew Birkhold

A little before midnight, Sunday I was awakened after hearing police scream, “Stand the fuck back.”  After getting out of bed to see what was happening, I walked outside and saw a white police officer beating a black man before handcuffing him and carrying him into in the back of a squad car.  My neighbor told me that the man was having a conversation with his girlfriend when police intervened and beat him.  As the no less than twenty police officers walked away from the scene, we told them they didn’t care about the members of our community.  As one young white officer left, he turned around and looked at us while we told him he didn’t care and that it was his presence, not ours, that made the neighborhood dangerous.  When he and I made eye contact, I said to him, “All you can say is ‘fuck it’”?  He smirked and walked away.

At that moment, I realized that there was very little human connection between this white police officer and the almost completely black neigborhood in which he walked the beat. My mind flashed back a few weeks to right after the acquittal of the officers who killed Sean Bell.  In the days following the trial, I walked around my Crown Heights neighborhood and where I once lived in Bed-Stuy.  As I walked past the mostly young, white, male beat cops on Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street, the looks on their faces said they were afraid.  One of my black male coworkers who lives in the same neighborhood told me he felt the same way and saw the same thing.  Police who are afraid of people are incapable of protecting them.

Because we live in a society where all people, black men included, are taught to be scared of black men, it shouldn’t be surprising that the police are scared of black men and black neighborhoods in general.  However, just because it’s not surprising doesn’t mean it’s okay.  We have to find a way to eliminate this fear.

If we are to live in a world where police brutality doesn’t exist, as a nation we have to begin to live and think about race in new ways.  To begin doing this, we must acknowledge that our communities and families are sick and need healing.  According to Assata Shakur, we must recognize that our families and communities are sick, and that “healing is needed in order for us to live in a society that where we’re not afraid to look somebody in the eye and say good morning.”

If we begin to heal our sick communities and families; our sick society, we will begin to walk down a path to building communities and relationships with one another that hasn’t been experienced in America since the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  This type of healing is akin to the transformational process of turning grief into hope.  We currently live in spiritually damaged world where a great deal of grieving must take place.  Fortunately, once human beings begin grieving, we also enter the path to healing.

In order to begin the healing that will end police brutality we must begin understand that cops are human and that they are merely symptoms of our spiritually sick world.  We must begin to see the culture of policing like we see cancer, as a disease in need of a cure.

Matt Birkhold is a Brooklyn based educator and writer.  He is founder of Political Education Outreach Collective and can be reached at birkhold (at) gmail (dot) com.

Why we can’t afford to waste time on this question.

Is College For You?
By R. L’Heureux Lewis

 y 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 of those who did not apply at all in asking themselves, “Is college for me?”

Friends often argue to me that “the numbers” answer the question. In the United States, only 28 percent of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree and only 17 percent of blacks hold one. So it’s clear, people reason, that college is not for everyone. Those who subscribe to that view also remind me that the average student comes out of college $20,000 in the hole with student debt. While I can’t dismiss these statistics, I think they paint a far too pessimistic and limited portrait. No, not every college is for everyone. But I do believe that there is a college for everyone. Black people’s progress in society depends on our participation in the educational system beyond high school. Any argument that suggests otherwise undermines our collective advancement.

For African Americans, the stakes of attending college are higher than those for our white counterparts, largely due to resources. Because black folks have lower average household incomes and lower average amounts of prior education, figuring out if college is a necessity rather than a luxury is a common dilemma. But this is not a new dilemma; over a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debated the types of schools that blacks should attend (which they never came to agreement on), but in the end both agreed that college was a necessity for the progress of black people in the United States. While resources are limited for the average African-American family, the benefits of continued educational pursuit are individual and collective.

In the past few years, I’ve had an opportunity to visit a number of high schools heavily populated with a black and brown children. When I present on the prospects of college and the future, inevitably a student or two will comment, “Well, you know, college isn’t for everyone.” I often respond, “Well, you have to try it to know if it is for you or not.”

While it makes sense to me that adolescents will question which path their lives should take, it is telling that in many of our schools, children are bred to believe that continued education may not get them what they want. In part, that may be due to the fact that many African Americans who complete college no longer reside in the neighborhoods from which they came, leading to declines in role models for children who remain in the inner city.

But that is only part of the story. Most research suggests that on average black children have higher educational aspirations than white children. This is surprising to many, but in reality these aspirations aren’t typically followed up by behaviors or experiences that will lead to college attendance. The gap between hopes and practices can be mended by producing high schools that prepare children not just to complete school, but that also put them on the path of further learning, whether they want to be a mechanic or a mathematician. One of the single best things local and state school systems can do is to see their job as not just kindergarten to 12th grade, but kindergarten to 16th grade.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

Anti-Smoking Drug Linked To Accidents

The Federal Drug Administration has banned the use of the anti-smoking drug Chantix by pilots or air traffic controllers, citing side effects that have been linked to auto accidents. What do you think?

Layla Smerker,
Auto Body Worker
“Look, before people get upset with the FDA, they should know Pfizer meticulously test-marketed this drug for years, and turns out there’s a large segment of the public who will risk insanity and death to stop smoking.”

Rich Klenk,
Hair Stylist
“This might explain why the pilot on my last flight constantly came on the PA to point out smokestacks below the plane.”

Matty Cimberg,
Systems Analyst
“This could make a good anti-smoking campaign: ‘If you smoke, no matter what you do, you will die a horrible death.’”