Whatever happens in the life of an African-American is fair-game here. But you are human first, so anything that makes you happy, frustrates you, angers you, worries you, or excites you serves as the fertile ground on which we can have this discussion.
In case you haven’t heard, there is a young woman in Kennett, Missouri who has gone through one of our worst nightmares. Three years ago, Heather Ellis was in a local Walmart shopping with her cousin. The two cousins decided to go in separate directions to find the shortest line. After seeing that her cousin’s line was shorter, Heather went to join him. That’s when things got strange.
Heather was accused of cutting line and the security guard was notified. According to Heather, she and her cousin repeatedly informed the guard that they were together, but that didn’t seem to matter. The police affidavit claims that Ellis was loud, belligerent and cursing when she was told to leave the store.
After police arrived, Ellis was taken to jail in front of her family. Her aunt, Lily Blackmon, arrived on the scene after receiving a call from her son about the incident. According to Blackmon, her niece’s head was being slammed against the police car and the officer only said “she cursed,” when asked why she was being treated so harshly.
Ellis was charged with disturbing the peace, trespassing, resisting arrest and two counts of assaulting a police officer. The young college student was then offered a plea bargain from Dunklin County Prosecutor, Stephen Sokoloff. The felony counts were reduced to one misdemeanor of disturbing the peace. However, Heather’s aunt believes that the offer was made so the family would not sue the police department.
Heather refused to take the plea deal, since she says she’d be lying if she admitted to committing a crime that day. Eleven months after the incident, the misdemeanor was surprisingly dropped. While this might seem to be good news, it wasn’t. The misdemeanors have been replaced by felony assault charges, carrying a maximum sentence of 15-years in prison.
Heather believes that the pending felonies have cost her two jobs and the chance to get into medical school. She still refuses to sign the plea deal. Either way, she has a reason to fight, and I want to fight with her. Heather’s case speaks to all of us: most of us have jumped the line at Walmart to be with a relative, and most of us know what it’s like to experience police abuse of authority. No matter how much cursing Heather might have done that day, she doesn’t deserve to go to prison. Also, if the prosecutor can reduce major felonies to one tiny misdemeanor, he could have dropped all the charges and let this woman go on with her education.
What makes a woman want to have sex? Is it physical attraction? Love? Loneliness? Jealousy? Boredom? Painful menstrual cramps?
Many women interviewed were having sex purely because they wanted the experience.
It turns out that woman have sex for all of these reasons and more, and that their choices are not arbitrary; there may be evolutionary explanations at work.
Psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss, both professors at the University of Texas at Austin, decided that the topic of "why women have sex" deserved a book of its own. They've woven scientific research together with a slew of women's voices in their new collaborative work, "Why Women Have Sex," published September 29 by Times Books.
"We do bring in men occasionally by way of contrast, but we wanted to focus exclusively on women so that the complexity of women's sexualpsychology was not given the short shrift, so to speak," said Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist.
The authors conducted a study from June 2006 to April 2009 that asked women whether they had ever had sex for one of 237 reasons, all of which had emerged in a previous study. About 1,000 women contributed their perspectives. Watch women answer The Question »
It turns out that women's reasons for having sex range from love to pure pleasure to a sense of duty to curiosity to curing a headache. Some women just want to please their partners, and others want an ego boost.
After dancing her way through school, former Miami Heat cheerleader has Fabienne Achille traded in her pom-poms for a stethoscope.
The pretty 28-year-old paid her way through pre-med school at University of Miami by cheering on the likes of Alonzo Mourning, then turned her attention to the grueling medical curriculum at University of South Florida. The ballgame glamor made her undergrad days memorable, but it wasn't exactly easy, she says.
“It was a lot of hard work especially being pre-med," Achille, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, says of her dancing days. "But it was definitely a very very enjoyable memorable time in my life.”
The obstetrician is now finishing her residency, delivering babies at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami -- the facility where she was born.
“It’s a hospital that deals with many many minorities, and of course people from my own culture,” she said.
Imagine a program that built a childcare center which gave teens construction work experience, used Department of Agriculture funds to pay poor women to cook for poor children, taught poor women to become day care teachers and run day cares, and helped poor women get their GED's. Imagine this program also provided mortgage counseling and founded a health center that provided forty local women with jobs. Now imagine the program was run almost entirely by black welfare mothers. Such a program did once exist. It was called Operation Life. It was at its peak during the 70's and 80's and is detailed in the book Storming Caesar's Palace by Annelise Orleck.
Operation Life was based on the principle that the poor themselves are the experts on poverty and many current successful programs make that adage their foundation. One such program is Jobs for a Future/Homeboy Industries. Homeboy Industries was founded in 1988 by the priest Father Greg Boyle and acts as both an employment agency and a force for economic development, meeting the needs of young people of both genders who have histories of gang involvement. It is funded by local and federal money. The organization helps one thousand people a month. It offers free counseling, tattoo removal, and help transitioning from prison. It provides community service opportunities to those with court mandates, creative writing workshops, and classes in business skills, running female headed households, dealing with domestic abuse, parenting, and general education with a focus on math and reading skills.
"Homeboy Industries was founded in 1988 as both an employment agency and a force for economic development."
Another factor in reducing poverty is looking for creative solutions that solve multiple problems. For example, many poor neighborhoods have constructed community gardens in vacant lots. The gardens change spaces once used for prostitution and drug dealing into crime free areas. They also reduce crime by providing young people with a positive activity in which to engage. In Philadelphia, crime on some blocks dropped 90% after the creation of community gardens. After all, it's hard to mug or shoot somebody surrounded by fresh tomatoes and sunflowers. (See "New York's Community Gardens - A Resource at Risk," The Trust for Public Land.)
"The fifteen community gardens in New York grew 11,000 pounds of food in 1999."
The gardens decrease racial tension as people of different cultures come to work together in them. People who once thought each of each other as strange and menacing come together as they encourage new life to grow. Furthermore, community gardens provide access to nature to young children who often are without green spaces. The gardens provide young people with experience on everything from ecology, to marketing (as they sell crops at farmers markets), to government as young people elect each other to decide how to govern their gardens. The gardens also provide the poor with the kind of nutritious food and exercise they are often otherwise denied. This helps prevents poor nutrition from leading to further health problems such as diabetes or babies with low birth weights. The fifteen community gardens in New York grew 11,000 pounds of food in 1999. More than meeting the needs of the community, surplus food is sold to raise money for the poor who grew the crops. Work in these gardens is used to rehabilitate criminals, and local business people are often willing to underwrite the start up costs of the gardens because community gardens raise property values. The creation of community gardens provides poor people with money, food, lower crime rates, higher property values, and better health, while increasing their autonomy and control of community solutions.
We all know there is no single policy that can be implemented to fight poverty - no wizard's spell or magic bullet. Several creative policies must be designed and employed. By creating policies based around two principles - the idea that the poor should not be punished by facing greater obstacles to escaping poverty when they choose to marry or profit from personal knowledge, and the idea that programs that creatively meet the needs of the poor and organize their efforts such as community gardens and tax-funded social programs can have a large impact in reducing destitution - we can help people to escape penury.
While no single policy can be considered a panacea, one major principle is crucial in aiding the poor - the idea that the poor themselves are a powerful resource in the struggle against poverty.
Shannon Joyce Prince is a contributing writer to YourBlackWorld.com, and a creative writing major at Dartmouth College. In addition to writing, she is an activist for indigenous and African issues, a ceramics maker, and a travel addict. She has been published in Frodo's Notebook, Falcon Wings, KUHF Magazine, Imprint, Rice University's Writers in the Schools Magazine, Illogical Muse, Damn Good Writing, Lost Beat Poetry, Haggard and Halloo, Houston Literary Review, Words on Paper, Bewildering Stories, The Smoking Poet, Muscadine Lines, Ragad, and The Green Muse. She also won Dartmouth's Thomas Ralston Prize for creative writing. She can be contacted at Shannon.J.Prince (at) Dartmouth.EDU.
The face of disgrace, Bill O'Reilly, found another way, yesterday, to take criminal swipes at the potential first lady, Michelle Obama. In a new segment he calls, "The Obama Chronicles," an "extensive 25-part series" on Sen. Barack Obama, O'Reilly made some deeply reprehensible comments. In an effort to slime the independent-minded Michelle Obama, Billo - as he's called by rival host Keith Olbermann - began by degradingly labeling Ms. Obama as "the controversial wife of the Democratic candidate." To affirm this folly-inspired categorization, O'Reilly further claimed - rather baselessly - that Michelle Obama "looks like an angry woman." Most YBW readers are aware of FOX News' reporter, Cal Thomas's despicable remarks, earlier this year, that most Black Women on TV are of some shade of angry. Bill O'Reilly, who has in the past, expressed willingness to lynch Michelle Obama -- on the condition that substantive proof is given that she feels a certain way about her country, blamed the victims of Hurricane Katrina for their demise, publicly expressed shock at the idea of Black people acting civically at an Harlem Restaurant, and claimed inner-city kids are innately incivil, is in no way morally equipped to assess the temperament of anyone -- let alone someone who, quite obviously, shatters the limited brain data he possesses.
As a Black woman, I'm so sick and tired of every time there is a media story about HIV/AIDS, a Black woman is featured predominately front and center. For example, Black In America, which was watched by nearly 5 million people in CNN’s two-day airing, dedicated nearly the entire HIV/AIDS segment enforcing the poster person to be a Black female, but there are numerous other examples.
Making a Black female the face of HIV/AIDS is a radical form of racism at its highest level and more proof that there is a conspiracy to keep Black women without love. This image of Black women creates more negative stereotypes that Black women are diseased and along with being loud, fat, bitches and hos, who are overbearing, booty-bouncing, undesirable she-men, no wonder Black women are the least married; sadly unbeknown, Black Women Need Love, Too! (www.BlackWomenNeedL oveToo.com)
The trickery to take the stigma of HIV/AIDS from being a White male homosexual disease to being a Black female heterosexual disease is consistent with racism in America. I cannot allow this type of deliberate prejudice to continue, especially since this is a big fallacy and here’s why:
According to http://www.medicaln ewstoday. com/articles/ 113244.php , the fastest growing group of HIV/AIDS cases TODAY are young Black males between the ages of 13-24, which is quite upsetting since I'm the mother of a 13 year old son to whom I tell NOT to ever have backdoor sex, with a boy or a girl, because that high risk behavior is very likely to cost you your health and ultimately, your life. This is advice that must be spread wide and far to lessen the number of infections in the Black community and worldwide among all groups of people.
The latest so-called breakdown of HIV/AIDS infections (figuring in one of four who are undiagnosed, of course, the vast majority being added to the Black heterosexual tally) is as follows (www.cdc.gov ): 53 percent is homosexual and bi-sexual men, and trip this, 4 percent homosexual men that inject drugs, why not just say 57 percent?? Thirty one percent is high-risk heterosexual sex, which is code for backdoor sex. Ladies, DO NOT allow this even with a condom because condoms break easier in the anus than in the front door, and twelve percent is injection drug use. These are all the main transmission routes of such a deadly disease. Over 80 percent of women with HIV/AIDS got it from heterosexual high-risk sex.
Since the beginning of this epidemic (circa 1981) through 2005, only 19 percent of all HIV/AIDS diagnosis has been women and a mere 16 percent of women have died from this dreadful disease. In other words, 81 percent of all diagnosis is MEN and 84 percent of all AIDS deaths have been men. http://www.cdc. gov/hiv/topics/ women/resources/ factsheets/ women.htm# 3
HIV/AIDS is NOT a female disease! Black women have NEVER encompassed the highest number of HIV/AIDS cases—the quote was “Black women are the FASTEST growing group of HIV/AIDS”, which is no longer true, meaning Black women were growing in numbers fastest, but are not the most. Then why areBlack women positioned predominately everywhere when this virus is discussed? The answer is RACISM and MISOGYNY at its finest.
Taking all this into consideration, backdoor sex accounts for nearly 82 percent of all transmission routes, but it seems everyone is afraid to tell the truth. I suppose, it’s easier to let people continue to contract and spread this disease and die? Ladies, common sense demands we stop booty-bouncing, booty posturing, and laughing at butt jokes, because this is not funny, people are dying!
I would like to remind everyone that I posted the high risk of backdoor sex on myspace.com blog over a year ago. I also contacted the Magic Johnson Foundation to alert the public about the huge hazard of backdoor sex, but of course, too many of us are more interested in being politically correct than telling the life-saving truth. Also, while conducting an interview on a popular blogtalkradio. com show, I was shocked and amazed by the arrogance of ignorance in regards to the dangers of backdoor sex. The response was my interview was banned because too many refused to acknowledge truth, and consistent with a popular mindset, defensiveness was the result. Lastly, I asked a friend, who is a gay activist (no confirmed cases of women to women or lesbian contraction of the virus) to help spread the word about the dangers of backdoor sex. I was told she couldn’t believe that people didn’t know the dangers of backdoor sex. Well, isn’t that quite obvious, due to the alarming rates of HIV/AIDS cases.
The arrogance of ignorance is mind-blowing, along with the fear associated with telling the hard-to-hear- truth is very disappointing and cowardly. Plus, it is like being an accomplice to murder for all the HIV/AIDS agencies to withhold the truth from the masses, when the obvious culprit (backdoor sex) is being hidden from the public at large.
So, I’m asking all of you to spread the word that RECEPTIVE BACKDOOR SEX is THE riskiest form of sex, whether performed on a male or female, and backdoor sex has at least a 50 times higher transmission rate than penis and vaginal sex. Plus, it is 500 times harder for women to spread this disease to men than it is for men to give it to women (deposit of teaspoons of semen vs. small slit in penis for fluid transfer). http://www.sfcitycl inic.org
Of course, AN ANSWER is using condoms, but it is not safe sex--only SAFER sex. Abstinence without injection drug use is the best way to stay clear of HIV/AIDS, but the species must continue via heterosexual front door sex, so let’s have safer responsible committed sex with someone to whom we know loves, honors, and cherishes us enough to NEVER cheat.
Also, it has been brought to my attention; males as well as females are participating in backdoor sex as an exchange for vaginal sex to prevent pregnancy. It's so very unfortunate that too many people don't understand the dangers of backdoor sex, which is much more deadly than getting pregnant. It’s safe to assume, they use no protection.
BTW, the number one cause of death for Black women between the ages of 24-35 is HIV/AIDS, so ladies you have been warned! The fact is, too many Black women are having too much backdoor sex. Black males have told me they didn’t know that a Booty-Call meant front door sex, so they went for the backdoor thinking it was the “in” thing to do. And Ladies, when dealing with men who have served time in jail, do not have any sex with them until you KNOW they don’t have HIV/AIDS by getting tested.
Everyone must participate in educating our family members, friends, and associates with this life-saving article. Without HIV/AIDS, young Black women would be among the healthiest.
Pearl Jr. is an author, activist, journalist and producer. She is is a member of the National Academy of Media Arts & Sciences. She has authored three books, one documentary and has successfully ran four websites (award-winning) and serves as the founder and owner of Elbow Grease Productions (EGP) and Pearl Jr. Publications. She is best known for her work in the African-American community.She is a long-time activist. As an activist, Pearl Jr. has successfully challenged major corporations to respect the Black community, she has protested and forced major corporations such as Nissan Motors, Ebay, and the NAACP to change their ways to better represent a positive image for African-Americans. Pearl Jr. has also leads the charge consistently against negative rap music. She writes widely published articles such as, "The Rap Crap Treason Act" and "The Golddigger lie leads to Black Male Failure," which has awaken the sleepy giant in the hearts and minds of the Black public.She runs the websites: TRUtalk.us, MichaelJacksonInsider.com, and BlackWomenNeedLoveToo.com
