EVENT ALERT: NYC This Weekend

By Gloria Dulan-Wilson

If you make it through the week end with all that's going on, you're a true New Yorker - these are just a few things that are topmost on the calendar of events. 


Wake the Town and Tell the People - Caribbean on Film in the 1970sThe newly minted territories of the Caribbean navigate local and international political and economic minefields while refashioning their social and cultural landscapes in the turbulent decade of afros, dashikis, guns and embargoes. 

Saturday, October 25
2:30pm: ‘Life & Debt’ (USA - 80 min).  Director: Stephanie Black.
A chilling examination of how day-to-day strategies for survival by ordinary Caribbean nationals are determined by the U.S. and other foreign economic agendas.  Post screening conversation with filmmaker Stephanie Black.

4:30pm: ‘'70 Remembering a Revolution’ (Trinidad & Tobago - 114 min).  Directors: Alex de Verteuil; ElizabethTopp.
Featuring interviews with activists, politicians and military officers this revealing; riveting chronicles the heady days of Black Power uprising in 1970 when “Power to the people!” was the popular cry.

6:30pm:  Convulsion and Creativity – A conversation on the issues and influences which shaped a decade, a region and the resulting cultural expression with Pat Belcon, PhD (Trinidad & Tobago), Merle Collins, PhD (Grenada)and others

8:00pm: ‘Forward Ever: The Killing of a Revolution’ (Grenada/Trinidad & Tobago - 113 min).  Director: Bruce Paddington
The 1983 invasion of Grenada by US forces echoed around the world and put an end to a unique experiment in Caribbean politics which began in 1979. What led to this extraordinary chain of events?

Sunday, October 26
4:30pm:  ‘W.A.R. (Walter Rodney) Stories’ (Guyana - 88 min).  Director: Clairmont Chung.
Academic and political leader, Walter Rodney was assassinated in 1980.  The film captures the essence of the man; the times the urgency of his message.  Post screening conversation with filmmaker Clairmont Chung.

7:00pm: ‘Stepping Razor – Red X’ (Canada - 103 min)
Peter Tosh was arguably one of the most controversial, creative forces in Jamaican popular culture. The film reveals the many sides and inner thoughts of this Rasta visionary, volatile musician and radical political activist through his fiery career to his dramatic death. 
A special Poets & Passion open mic program hosted by poet, Ras Osageyfo will be held in observance of Peter Tosh’s 70th birthday following the screening.

Edison O. Jackson Auditorium - Medgar Evers College
1638 Bedford Ave (corner Crown St.), Brooklyn, NY 11225

For additional information: 718-783-8345 | 718-270-6218 |info@caribbeantheatre.org

RSVP

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New York Speaks:  A Hearing on our Right to Communicate and Connect Monday, October 27th 5pm - Interactive Presentation on the Plaza 6pm - Hearing in the Dweck Center Brooklyn Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza RSVP NOW
The Internet has transformed how everyday people – especially those historically underrepresented in media – can communicate with each other and the world.  On Monday, we’re proud to participate in a hearing in New York City on our right to communicate  - hosted by our friends at Free Press, Media Action Grassroots Network, Consumers Union and Common Cause.

Join Color of Change as we stand together with our Voices for Internet Freedom partners to send a message to the Federal Communications Commission: We want One Internet. No blocking. No discrimination.

Some  (NEGRO) representatives and organizations – after taking massive funding from the telecom industry – are working to undermine real Internet freedom by attacking Title II reclassification, which courts have told the FCC is the only way for it to protect net neutrality. That's why it's so important for Black people and our allies to make our voices heard right now. 

RSVP today to tell the FCC that you stand for nothing less than real net neutrality

Not in NYC? Watch our Facebook for the online stream and ways to participate remotely.

Thanks and Peace, Rashad, Arisha, Matt, Brandi, Dallas, and the entire ColorOfChange.org team.

Help support our work. ColorOfChange.org is powered by YOU—your energy and dollars. We take no money from lobbyists or large corporations that don't share our values, and our tiny staff ensures your contributions go a long way.

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STAY BLESSED

On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 9:56 AM, LaZette McCants <volunteerdivas@gmail.com> wrote:

FYI

Sent by: Walk Tall Girl Productions Reply to the sender

Pulitzer Prize & Tony Award winner Suzan-Lori Parks at The Public Theater. Dear BTO Family: The Public Theater has offered Black Theater Online subscribers a limited number of complimentary tickets to see the groundbreaking production of FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS (Parts 1, 2 & 3) written by Suzan-Lori Parks (the first African-American female to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama). Parks (Topdog/Underdog, The Book of Grace) continues her longstanding relationship with The Public with the stunning first installment of a new American Odyssey, set over the course of the Civil War. Offered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be yet another empty promise. As his decision brings him face-to-face with a nation at war with itself, the loved ones Hero left behind debate whether to escape or wait for his return… only to discover that for Hero, free will may have come at a great spiritual cost. A devastatingly beautiful dramatic work filled with music, wit and great lyricism, FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS is an epic tale about holding on to who we are and what we love in a country that both brings us together and rips us apart. Jo Bonney (Small Engine Repair, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark) directs this extraordinary new play from one of America's most powerful writers. The Public's free ticket offer covers four performances. TICKETS MUST BE RESERVED BY THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23 BY 1:OO PM. You may secure up to four (4) tickets for any one performance. Unfortunately, we cannot honor ticket requests for multiple performances or multiple submissions to accommodate additional guests. Click here to reserve your tickets for Friday, October 24 at 7:30 pm. Click here to reserve your tickets for Saturday, October 25 at 1:30 pm. Click here to reserve your tickets for Saturday, October 25 at 7:00 pm. Click here to reserve your tickets for Sunday, October 26 at 1:30 pm. You will receive an email confirming your reservations. The tickets will be held under your name at The Public Theater box office and you should pick them up at least one half hour before curtain. The Public Theater is located at 425 Lafayette Avenue (at Astor Place) in New York City. I hope that you will take advantage of this amazing offer. Enjoy the performance! Best regards, Marcia Pendelton Walk Tall Girl Productions/ Black Theater Online P.S. Remember, seating is limited, so if you reserve tickets, please show up for the performance! connect with us   This e-mail was sent from Walk Tall Girl Productions Immediate removal with PatronMail® SecureUnsubscribe. To forward this e-mail to a friend or colleague, use this link. To change your e-mail address or update preferences, use this link.

LaZette McCants Volunteer Divas & Divos Plus...

 

If you even got this far, you've done a great deal - make sure you make the hearing on 

NET NEUTRALITY on Monday, October 27 - it's essential that we be counted

 

Stay Blessed & 

ECLECTICALLY BLACK 

Gloria 

ARTICLE: Where slavery thrived, inequality rules today

-->By Gloria Dulan-Wilson
The tragedy of the article I'm sharing with you below is that this is not new news to us - we who were/are the victims of slavery, know all too well the seriousness of post traumatic slave syndrome in it's physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional incarnations.  We see it all around us, and, unfortunately, when we look in the mirror, or at many of our friends, loved ones, neighbors, enemies (?), we see it in them as well.

Try as we might, when we think we've defeated it in one arena, it rears its ugly head in another.  Of course there are also those of us who are in denial as to whether or not we are affected by this uber massive affliction.  And I applaud them for wanting to put it behind them and move forward.  Would that we could on a mass mentality level.  But the sad state of affairs is that it's like a gaping wound that has been systematically covered over with a series of inadequate bandaids, and exacerbated by the salt that is continually being rubbed in them by the perpetrators who continue to poke at it, while at the same time either telling us to "get over it" or that "it's no big deal" or that "this is a different age or time," while continuing to commit the same crimes in a different, more sophisticated way.

We are fortunate that we can cover our pain in a panache of false smiles, proper english, beautiful clothes, bleached blonde hair or wigs, mis-education with higher level degrees up the ying/yang, and all manners of camouflage.  

But those of our brothers and sisters who were not so fortunate, who got stuck in the muck of the southern sado/masochistic symbiotic relationships, are still living as if they had just stepped off the plantation; as if they had just received their manumission papers and didn't know what to do with their "freedom."  

Now this, folks, is my commentary without having read the article - because we know this story all too well - we've got relatives still going through it.  I find it interesting that this article has been written at this point in time, and I'm curious to see what, if any, impact or change it will make on the meanstream majority. 

W.E.B. DuBois wrote "The Philadelphia Negro" in 1899, where gave sociological and statistical data on the lives of Black people during the post-slavery era, as well,    Some of the same issues identified in the following article exist and continue to linger into modern times, even though Philadelphia was not part of a slave state, but a Northern industrialized community, with superior educational systems in place.  The entire text of DuBois' study can be found online for those interested in reading this classic. 

The fact remains that regardless of who did the study, or when it was conducted, there is much to be resolved if it is not to continue as a canker sore on the butt of America.  We definitely should not be waiting to see whether the meanstream, is going to save us, or if we are going to save ourselves.  Or whether this will be a cooperative effort.

I still maintain, "if no one else will save you, save yourself!"

Stay Blessed & 
ECLECTICALLY BLACK 

Gloria Dulan-Wilson

The text of the article follows: 

 

Where slavery thrived, inequality rules today

More than a century later, some experts say, a terrible institution is still exacting its price

By Stephen Mihm

  | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT   AUGUST 24, 2014

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Fluker, La., and other municipalities with ties to slavery often lack social mobility.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, Standard and Poor’s Rating Services, a credit rating firm that rarely weighs in on social issues, published a scathing report on income inequality and social mobility in the United States. The firm warned that current levels of inequality were “dampening” growth, and predicted that “inequalities will extend into the next generation, with diminished opportunities for upward social mobility.”

This unusual report on inequality, like Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book on the same subject, addresses unequal fortunes, declining mobility, and stagnating economic growth as national or even global problems, which demand similarly large-scale solutions. But scholars are also well aware that these problems vary greatly from place to place. Consider a recent, much-publicized study of social mobility by economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Harvard and Berkeley. As the illuminating map generated by that study shows, children born in some regions—Salt Lake City and San Jose, Calif., for example—have a reasonable shot of moving up the social ladder. By contrast, many parts of the former Confederacy, it seems, are now the places where the American dream goes to die.

Why is that true? At first blush, you might guess race could explain the variation. When the study’s authors crunched the data, they found that the larger the black population in any given county, the lower the overall social mobility. But there was more to the story than blacks unable to break the cycle of poverty. In a passing comment, Chetty and his co-authors observed that “both blacks and whites living in areas with large African-American populations have lower rates of upward income mobility.” Far from being divergent, the fates of poor blacks and poor whites in these regions are curiously, inextricably, intertwined.

Instead of chalking it up to race, recent research points toward a more startling and somewhat controversial explanation: When we see broad areas of inequality in America today, what we are actually seeing is the lingering stain of slavery. Since 2002, with increasing refinement in the years since, economic historians have argued that the “peculiar institution,” as it was once called, is dead but not gone. Today, in the 21st century, it still casts an economic shadow over both blacks and whites: “Slavery,” writes Harvard economist Nathan Nunn, “had a long-term effect on inequality as well as income.”

His work is representative of a new, more historical direction within economics. Its proponents believe that institutions devised centuries ago tend to persist, structuring economic reality in the 21st century in ways that are largely invisible. Their hope is that, by tracing these connections between past and present, they may be able to point the way toward more effective solutions to today’s seemingly intractable economic problems.

***

IN 2002, two economic historians, Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, published an influential paper that tried to answer a vexing question: why are some countries in the Americas defined by far more extreme and enduring levels of inequality—and by extension, limited social mobility and economic underdevelopment—than others?

The answer, they argued, lay in the earliest history of each country’s settlement. The political and social institutions put in place then tended to perpetuate the status quo. They concluded that societies that began “with extreme inequality tended to adopt institutions that served to advantage members of the elite and hamper social mobility.” This, they asserted, resulted in economic underdevelopment over the long run.

More specifically, they observed that regions where sugar could be profitably grown invariably gave rise to societies defined by extreme inequality. The reason, they speculated, had to do with the fact that large-scale sugar plantations made intensive use of slave labor, generating institutions that privileged a small elite of white planters over a majority of black slaves. These institutions, their later work suggested, could encompass everything from property rights regimes to tax structures to public schools.

Harvard economist Nathan Nunn offered a more detailed statistical analysis of this “Engerman-Sokoloff hypothesis” in a paper first published in 2008. His research confirmed that early slave use in the Americas was correlated with poor long-term growth. More specifically, he examined county-level data on slavery and inequality in the United States, and found a robust correlation between past reliance on slave labor and both economic underdevelopment and contemporary inequality. He disagreed with Engerman and Sokoloff’s claim that it was only large-scale plantation slavery that generated these effects; rather, he found, any kind of slavery seemed to have begotten long-term economic woes.

Nunn also offered a more precise explanation for present-day troubles. In Engerman and Sokoloff’s narrative, slavery led to inequality, which led to economic underdevelopment. But when Nunn examined levels of inequality in 1860—as measured by holdings of land—these proved a poor predictor of future problems. Only the presence of slavery was a harbinger of problems. “It is not economic inequality that caused the subsequent development of poor institutions,” wrote Nunn. “Rather, it was slavery itself.”

This finding was echoed in a study by Brazilian economists Rodrigo Soares, Juliano Assunção, and Tomás Goulart published in the Journal of Comparative Economics in 2012. Soares and his colleagues examined the connection between historical slavery and contemporary inequality in a number of countries, largely in Latin America. The authors found a consistent correlation between the existence—and intensity—of slavery in the past and contemporary inequality. Moreover, this relationship was independent of the number of people of African descent living there today. As Soares said in an interview, “Societies that used more slavery are not more unequal simply because they have relatively more black people.”

The question, then, is how exactly did slavery have this effect on contemporary inequality? Soares and his colleagues speculated that limited political rights for slaves and their descendants played a role, as did negligible access to credit and capital. Racial discrimination, too, would have played a part, though this would not explain why whites born in former slaveholding regions might find themselves subject to higher levels of inequality. Nunn, though, advanced an additional explanation, pointing to an idea advanced by Stanford economic historian Gavin Wright in 2006.

In lands turned over to slavery, Wright had observed, there was little incentive to provide so-called public goods—schools, libraries, and other institutions—that attract migrants. In the North, by contrast, the need to attract and retain free labor in areas resulted in a far greater investment in public goods—institutions that would, over the succeeding decades, offer far greater opportunities for social mobility and lay the foundation for sustained, superior economic growth.

As it happens, a contemporary critic of slavery took it upon himself to measure some of these differences between North and South. In 1857, a Southerner named Hinton Rowan Helper published an incendiary book titled “The Impending Crisis.” Though a virulent racist, Helper was no friend of slavery, and he quantified in excruciating detail the relative number of schools, libraries, and other institutions in both free and slaveholding states, finding time and again that his region failed to measure up to the North.

In Pennsylvania he found 393 public libraries, but in South Carolina, a mere 26. In the South, he observed, “the common school-house, the poor man’s college, is hardly known, showing how little interest is felt in the chief treasures of the State, the immortal minds of the multitude who are not born to wealth.”

***

WHAT SOMEONE like Helper may not have foreseen is that the abolition of slavery would not cure these ills. The destruction of slavery did not destroy all the political institutions, social mores, and cultural traditions that sustained it. Nor did it make public institutions, of the kind that the north had been building for decades, suddenly come into being.

This notion about the “persistence” of economic institutions is part of a larger dialogue within economics. Economists ranging from MIT’s Daron Acemoglu to Harvard’s Melissa Fisher have examined how institutions and practices adopted centuries ago can shape economic reality. But not everyone buys the idea that the past can structure the present in such an enduring, predictable fashion. Wright is among the critics of this approach; he is skeptical of Engerman and Sokoloff’s hypothesis. “The persistence of inequality per se is a myth,” he says, pointing to research that highlights the degree to which inequality has ebbed and flowed in Latin America.

Wright counts himself “unconvinced” regarding comparable claims about the United States. “No doubt slavery has played some kind of background role,” he concedes. But he sees the relationship between historical slavery and contemporary inequality as an interesting correlation, not a directly causal one. Correlating one variable with another across the centuries “isn’t the same as writing history,” he notes. “If you don’t connect the dots, you’re just groping.”

Another criticism of the “persistence” school is that it may justify passivity. If counties or countries have always been poor or unequal because of something that happened so long ago, what chance do contemporary policy makers have at deflecting the dead hand of the past?

But there is room for hope, as Wright’s own research would suggest. In “Sharing the Prize,” an economic history of the civil rights movement published in 2013, Wright found that efforts to end discrimination paid substantial, enduring benefits to black Southerners. Perhaps more surprisingly, he found that the movement benefited whites, too. Many poorer whites found that that the destruction of the old order—the end of poll taxes, for example—ushered in increased levels of public funding for schools, newfound political power, and a host of other economic, political, and educational benefits, particularly in the years immediately following the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

That revolution, of course, is still a work in progress. As we’ve been reminded over the last two weeks by the clashes in Ferguson, Mo., between mostly black protesters and a mostly white police force, there’s a long way to go before the vestiges of slavery are fully and finally made a thing of the past. But this new body of research may help us grasp that solutions to persistent inequality will require more focused policies. Increasing the level of food stamps, as economist Paul Krugman has suggested, might help, but it is perhaps too diffuse and indiscriminate a solution.

Instead, the best way to deal with the lingering effects of dead institutions like slavery may be to create regional institutions aimed to promoting social mobility and economic growth. Georgia, for example, has tried to level the field with the “HOPE Scholarship,” which enables high schoolers with a “B” average or higher to attend in-state public colleges and universities for free and private in-state schools at a heavy discount.

Such programs, with some modifications, could go a long way toward promoting social mobility in the former slaveholding regions of the United States. That’s not to say that the problems will be easy to solve. But the progress we’ve already made, both politically and economically, would suggest that while we may live in slavery’s shadow, we are not prisoners of the past, either.

Stephen Mihm is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, and co-author, with Nouriel Roubini, of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance” (2010).

Sylvia Watts McKinney
Executive Director

Philadelphia

Temple University – ECEC
1509 Cecil B. Moore Avenue, Second Floor, Suite 222, Philadelphia, PA 19121
t 215 204 5989  m 215 341 7272  f 215 204 7439  e sylvia.mckinney@nfte.com

www.nfte.com