The buying power of African-Americans continues to grow, but advertisers are missing the mark by passing over black-oriented media.
That is the conclusion of a Nielsen report, which shows that of the $75 billion spent last year in the U.S. on television, magazines, Internet and radio advertising, less than 3 percent went to media focused on black audiences.
It is with extreme sadness that I inform The Chess Drum readership of the death of FM Ronald Simpson. He succumbed to Stage Four cancer on Thursday, September 19th. Simpson was an active member of the North Carolina community after being a legendary figure in New York’s “Black Bear School of Chess” for many years. Ron’s last USCF rating was 2338 and last tournament was the Asheboro Open in July…which he won.
Even if they come from affluent families or attend highly rated schools, black students in Ohio continue to lag far behind their white peers in school, according to a Dispatch analysis of data from state standardized exams.
On more than two dozen state tests given to students in kindergarten through high school last year, the average passage rate among black students was 64 percent. On average, 87 percent of white students passed.
Disparities between races have existed across the country since schools were physically divided by race, researchers say, but many now view those gaps largely as a product of high poverty among minorities.
Bill Siegel,...skillfully directs “The Trials of Muhammad Ali.” In terms of archival footage Siegel has an embarrassment of reel riches to choose from. The director, a researcher for the 1994 Oscar-nominated doc “Hoop Dreams,” selects wisely and edits a knockout.
Highlights include the doc’s opening, with a black and white clip of talk show host David Susskind, the archetypal liberal, delivering an excoriating televised verbal assault on Ali during his draft trials and tribulations that is even more vituperative than segregationist Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox’s later remarks. On the other hand, there is a color clip of neocon George W. Bush awarding the athlete the Medal of Freedom in a 2005 White House ceremony. There is much footage of Malcolm X -- before and after his split from the NOI. In other shots, Ali the separatist hugs Martin Luther King and calls the integrationist “brother;” in another clip Dr. King calls on all young men to do as Ali did by filing for C.O. status and lauding his “courage” for refusing to fight in Vietnam. A laughing Coretta Scott King later tells Ali he is “our champion in boxing and in justice.”
We also hear from Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown along with famous African American sports figures. Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain and John Carlos, who made a gloved Black power salute during the 1968 Olympics awards ceremony in Mexico, support Ali, while ex-heavyweight champ Joe Louis and baseball’s racial trendsetter Jackie Robinson (who similarly betrayed Paul Robeson in the 1950s) oppose him. Meanwhile, the recently deceased talk show great David Frost takes the blustery Ali to task for calling all white people “devils.”
The 30 minutes of REW-FFWD are introduced as the content of a “black box,” the video record of a nameless photojournalist’s trip to Jamaica,....
The journalist is sent to Trench Town, Kingston by an ignorant and somewhat racist editor who wants a “Heart of Darkness” story on what he assumes is a violent, barbaric island nation. When the journalist finally arrives, his car breaks down and he is forced to stay with the actually warm and helpful locals until the local mechanic can fix it.
The black man occupies a unique space in American culture. He is an aggressive and inherently violent threat to society. Both insatiable and lazy, he is creator of chaos and maker of his own inevitable demise; he is forever guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. He does not feel pain, or remorse, or empathy. As angry and volatile as their female counterparts, black men, by their very presence, give society reason to assume the defensive. He is simultaneously invisible and ever present in the minds and lives of white America. A non-citizen, he holds no right to self-defense.
Debased, filthy and unworthy, black men, we are told, are sexual deviants incapable of either desiring or maintaining healthy, meaningful relationships.
In fact, at a recent fellowship dinner at Columbia Law School, a wealthy, white businessman told me that the biggest business problem occurring in America is the inability of black women to find [black] husbands. He declared that this travesty is rooted in the black man’s inability to commit, not just to a woman, but also to a job. Upon picking my jaw off the floor, I concluded three important things: (1) my supposedly personal decisions regarding who I choose to fuck or date or marry are very much political, (2) so long as I date black men, I will carry their burden, and (3) while my decision to primarily date black men is a conscious one, it is not necessarily simple.
As a racially ambiguous woman, I have the privilege of changing the way society receives me at my discretion. Sometimes I am black, other times I am Indian or Latina, or I may be French, or just a white girl who tans a bit too much. Sometimes I am intimidating or a race-baiting Angry Black Woman, but I can just as easily morph into innocent and approachable. Over time I’ve found that the easiest way to change my ethnicity – change the way people treat me – is to change my company. And the company that most defines us is, in fact, our choice in a mate. When I choose to date a black man, I inevitably send a message to society about who I am and what I represent. When I choose to date a black man, I choose to be ignored at bars, barred from clubs, humiliated by groups of drunken white men, or passed over by taxis. I choose to internalize their experiences of undervaluation, passed over promotions and emasculation. I choose to carry the burden of [dating] black men, and I choose it often; 90% of the men I’ve dated are black.
