Vogue went all old-timey with its most recent cover which, to my eyes, hearkens back to the imagery of Jim Crow-era propaganda.

King James won’t be happy with a ring, he wants your women (all of them) too!

23/6 makes the apt comparison below:

Some time after 9/11 the New York City MTA created a new campaign to encourage citizens to report suspicious activity in the city’s subways. The tag line is “If You See Something, Say Something.” (as seen below… Spanish style).

Recently, the MTA has papered the subways with a new ad that celebrates the fact that, in 2007, 1,944 people saw something and said something.

That’s it? Only 1,944?

The subway ridership in New York is 1.5 billion… per year. 4.9 million per week.

This leads me to believe that the Stop Snitchin’ campaign has officially crossed over.

I mean, I alone have witnessed 1,000 incidents that could have warranted a call to 311… but I ain’t no snitch.

A woman I work with recently asked me if I remembered Mike, Pam and Penny from the Dick and Jane readers. I assured her that she must have grown up with some bootleg version of the books because there certainly were no black characters in the series when I was a child.

Lo and behold - she was right. Back in the sixties, a black family actually did move in next door to Dick and Jane.

But by the time I got around to reading Dick and Jane in the late 70s early 80s, the black family was no where to be seen. Which raises the question, did the publishers create a transition title in the 70s called “White Flight with Dick and Jane” to explain why Mike, Pam and Penny were no longer around?

Dick: Look Sally. The moving truck is here. We are moving.
Sally: I am sad. What about our friends? Our friends Pam and Penny?
Jane: Oh no Sally. They are staying here.
Dick: Oh yes. They are staying. We are moving. Moving before the property values fall.

As I mentioned in the ephemera, Met life is selling Stuy Town and Peter Cooper Village for a proposed $5 billion dollars. That price tag would make it the largest real estate deal involving the purchase of a single property in America in modern times.

Nearly two-thirds of the apartments currently have regulated rents at half the market rate. This will be a definite blow to advocates of affordable housing in New York.

Amy Fox, my next door neighbor senior year of college, wrote a wonderful article for the New York Times on the battle her grandparents and other residents fought to integrate Stuy Town in the 1950s. The article is behind the TimesSelect wall, but a slide show of wonderful photos is still available with Amy narrating.

I was going to link to this archive of old cereal boxes cause it is totally awesome. But I thought a few of the boxes deserved to be highlighted.

Apparently Native American, Mexican, Chinese and Black folks didn’t eat cereal back in the day:

Jose The Monkey

Apparently his name is SoHi

“Rick Shaw Inside!”

The chopsticks are awesome

These cats didn’t even get names…

No comment…

A rip-snortin’ cereal, a rootin’ tootin’ snack?

A psychology professor at Tufts recently copmpleted a study that showed that diverse groups perform better than homogenous groups when it comes to decision making. The key finding is much more interesting…this is due largely to dramatic differences in the way whites behave in diverse groups–changes that occur even before group members begin to interact.

Whites on diverse juries cited more case facts, made fewer mistakes in recalling facts and evidence, and pointed out missing evidence more frequently than did those on all-white juries…

To the guy that sat next to me in the evidence exam last semester, you owe me a beer for the extra points you got as a result of my presence.

I saw Dave Chappelle at what used to be the Boston Comedy Club on 3rd Street last year. It was an impromptu show, he literally walked in off the street and asked if he could do a set. I was lucky enough to be next door and was alerted by a friend that he was there. Dave immediately lit into me when I entered the room.

“Damn! Look at this big nigga. You look like you could fuck somebody up! Where you from?”

“Ohio”

“You know I live in Ohio…”

“Oh yeah? Whereabouts?”

“Green County”

“What on earth are you doing in Green County?”

“What the hell you thing I’m doing in Green County?”, he said as he put his index finger and thumb together and made the universal sign for smoking weed.

He was mostly off that night. He seemed drunk or high. Too drunk. Too high. He was having a hard time staying on his stool and his jokes were all off the top. He seemed erratic.

Needless to say, when he quit the show a few weeks later, I wasn’t surprised and was able to tell my “yeah he didn’t look so good” story for the next couple of weeks.

When my friend sent me the link to the Chappelle Theory, I was intrigued. It is authored by an alleged retired public relations executive and posits that a cabal of influential black media moguls and politicos exerted their influence and power over Dave and drove him to mental ruin. Think Oprah, Bob Johnson, Farrakahn, Cosby, et al. The reason? He was making black people look bad. While the theory is preposterous, the story is flawlessly told and it is a fun exercise in the “what if?”

Cut to Chappelle’s recent interview with Oprah.

Read this article from the Washington Post after you have familiariazed yourself with the theory.

Freaky huh?

Update: Chappelle Theory was authored by anti-social.com.

Richard Pryor died today.

What blows my mind about Richard is that when you listen to much of his material, it doesn’t sound all that different from the likes of Chris Rock or a Eddie Murphy. Then it dawns on you. He was talking about having sex with white women on stage in the early 1970s! That was less than a decade after the death of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy. It was less than a decade after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. I read somewhere that Pryor was the Malcom to Dick Gregory’s Martin. I haven’t had any exposure to Gregory’s work, but I can see where the Malcolm reference is apropos. Pryor’s routines must have scared the bejesus out of some white folks at the time. When viewed in that context, Pryor’s material was truly political (and revolutionary).

Later tonight, I am going to dust off my copy of the Bicentennial Nigger LP, pore a glass of bourbon over ice, and spend some time with Mr. Pryor.

Rest in Peace Richard.

Update: I really hope that they do a tribute show for Pryor. The talent that would line up for that show might be unmatched in history.

Judy Rosen gives the lumber to David Brooks over his recent op-ed on French “Gangsta Rap”.

A friend of mine asked me the other day what I thought about my baseball team’s name and mascot. She would be referring to The Cleveland Indians and Chief Wahoo.

Chief Wahoo

I have been a tribe fan all of my life. I can’t imgine calling my team anything but the Indians. But, both the Chief and the team name have got to go. If Detroit up and changed it’s name to the Detroit Negroes and sewed a sambo mascot to their hats we would be up in arms - and by we I mean nearly everybody.

Sambo

We weren’t always the Indians by the way. From 1901 to 1914, the team had three different names: the Cleveland Blues, the Cleveland Bronchos and the Cleveland Naps. Naps was derived from a former player named Napoleon Lajoie. When Lajoie was traded to Philly, the team’s name was changed to the Indians in response to a local newspaper contest.

In 1995, the Indians released a press release explaining that:

“The Cleveland Indians organization is very aware of the sensitivities involved in this issue. We have gone to great lengths to respect those sensitivities. In no way do we intend to demean any group, especially one as pround as Native Americans. The logo is simply a caricature that has enjoyed decades of fan appeal in the Northeast Ohio area…”

Last time I checked, a caricature was “a representation in which the subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect.”

So essentially the ball club was saying, “We don’t mean to demean. We are laughing with you, not at you.”

How on earth can anybody seriously defend this uniform anymore?

I advocate returning to the Cleveland Blues. If the show fits… wear it.