Discussion
An Ohio mother of two was sentenced to 10 days in jail and placed on three years probation after sending her kids to a school district in which they did not live. Kelly Williams-Bolar was sentenced by Judge Patricia Cosgrove on Tuesday and will begin serving her sentence immediately. The jury deliberated for seven hours […]
Make no mistake about it, the shooting outside an Arizona grocery store last week that seriously injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, killed six people, and wounded 13 others was a horrible manifestation of the bitter and ugly political times we live in. As everyone knows by now, the assassination attempt by 22 year-old Jared Lee Loughner […]
Black History Month doesn’t begin until February but our own Black Planet members and staff didn’t let that stop them from taking on a tremendous task to revitalize a very important landmark in the New York community. A historic Harlem tennis court affectionately referred to as “The Jungle” received a much-needed makeover. Over the weekend, […]
A conversation concerning the current state and future of our country will take place this week in D.C., and it won’t be held in the halls of Congress or The White House. Tavis Smiley’s “America’s Next Chapter” will air this Thursday from 6 to 9 P.M. EST on C-Span and feature eight prominent figures of […]
In one of her three great books—I can’t remember which because I read her complete works back-to-back-to-back—Gayl Jones has a mock dialogue which I’ll paraphrase like so: White Person: Why aren’t there more great Black scientists? Black Person: All our best minds are tackling the “race problem”. I was reminded of this again yesterday after […]
When I think about the beating that Black women took in 2010 and now prepare to forecast a glorious 2011 for ya’ll, I reminded how Winston Churchill said at the time when his England seemed almost certainly doomed to go down in defeat to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, “If the British Empire and it’s Commonwealth last […]
Somewhere mixed up in all the convoluted history that we’ve been forced to internalize, the image of the non-violent Black in the face of white hostility has still managed to survive despite all the evidence to the contrary. For some reason—maybe because white history books have gone to painstaking lengths to downplay just how violently […]
When I was in high school, this Armenia kid named Nicky ran up on me one day and said, “Hey Byers! You know how you get five Black men to stop raping a white woman?” I shrugged. “Toss them a basketball!” he said. “That joke is dumb,” I said after a pause. “It should have […]
By Hakim Hasan When Ishmael Reed, professor emeritus at the University of California Berkeley, went shopping his book Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers to the American publishing establishment, he came away with one nagging question: Are Black writers with a strong left of center political bent an […]
Any fan of hip hop knows that prison culture and experience is a fundamental part of rap music. For good or bad, nearly every “gangsta” rapper in America has either been to prison, has a friend in prison, is on his way to prison or is in prison right now. Lil Wayne and TI, two […]
Earlier this week, the New York Daily News shined a spotlight on Reverend Al Sharpton’s non-profit organization The National Action Network. Highlighting Sharpton’s executive salary, the story attempts to portray activist Sharpton as someone more committed to building his personal fortune than advancing his mission of social justice.
In a recent article, Rev. Al Sharpton claimed that America is failing Black men on various levels such as education and employment.