I was walking with three friends in the village the other day when the following advertisement stopped exactly two of us in our tracks.

Can you guess how many members of our group are black?

P - heart - M’s project manager should be fired. I guess in the focus group, no one told him or her that nooses are still not funny to black folks.

From Karen Russel at huffingtonpost.com - The GOP’s African-American Talking Points

From Arrian Huffington herself:

“Delay, Frist, Abramoff, Safavian… Wasn’t this the crowd that was going to “restore honor and integrity” to Washington? If this is what integrity looks like, let’s bring back Oval Office blow jobs.”

According to Bill Bennet criticism of his comments below are “ridiculous, stupid, totally without merit.”

“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” Mr. Bennettsaid in the broadcast. “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”

As I crossed 6th Avenue at Houston the other day, I came across the most curious advertisement:

Coming Soon. Steve Returns. Spring 2005.

I was puzzled for a moment, assuming that Steve was a television character or a reality show contestant that I was unaware of. The small logo in the corner of the advertisement alerted me to the identity of this mysterious Steve. He was, of course, Steve Madden of trendy shoe fame. And from whence does he return you might ask? Prison. Also known affectionately as The Joint, The Bing or The Clink.

I have since seen other ads:

A new meaning for the word spring time. Steve returns. Spring 2005.

Or the one on the company’s website:

There’s one pair of shoes that’s been impossible to fill. Steve Returns. Spring 2005.

My first reaction was outrage. It sure would be nice, I thought, if all felons that served their time were greeted with such open arms. I can see it now, huge banners hanging from the doors of the local grocery store celebrating the return of Tito, a stock boy before he was sent upstate for the dime bag of marijuana he had in his glove box. The sign proclaiming:

Now back in stock. Tito Returns. Spring 2005.

But there are no such open arms reaching out to welcome most convicted felons; no support networks to aid them in their attempts to integrate back into society. In fact, it seems that we make it as difficult as possible. Convicted felons are routinely denied job opportunities that they are qualifed to perform and desperately need to create a strong foothold in the world outside of prison. Even if we throw the notion that prison can rehabilitate to the wind, employers fail to base their decisions on some objective criteria that evaluates the crime in relation to the duties of the job. We just don’t like criminals.

Many states go further and actively deny the franchise to felons - a signal that the state believes that, no matter whether prison is justified on a punishment theory or a rehabilitative one, that prison is insufficient. If prison is punishment, we have not punished you enough. If prison is rehabilitative, we don’t think it worked.

But perhaps my outrage wasn’t the appropriate response. Viewed a different way, this is an opportunity of unprecedented proportions. For the first time, companies are celebrating the return of their convicted, sentenced, imprisoned and freed employees. I hope that you, Mr. Madden, and you too Ms. Stewart, realize that your warm welcomes could have been anything but. And I hope that you understand that most similarly situated folks don’t have such an easy landing.

I’d like to ask you both to consider this as you return to your jobs and your old lives. Each of you should do whatever is in your power to focus your organizations on providing opportunities to ex-felons. More importantly, you should put your names and your sizable resources to immediate work in advocating for the rights, interests and needs of your newly unincarcerated brotheren and sisteren.

If you both do that, I will certainly celebrate your homecomings.

Guy: Come on…. You can’t tell me you didn’t like Wesley Snipes.

Girl: Nope… Cause he don’t date black women. *

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* I suppose it could be true that Mr. Snipes in fact only dates white women, but I refuse to search the Internet for indicia of Wesley’s dating preferences. Instead, I am going to assume that this young lady based her opinion solely on Mr. Snipes performance in Jungle Fever.

I am perusing hip-hop classics at Amazon and I just came across NWA’s Straight Outta Compton. As I looked at the “Customers interested in NWA may also be interested in…” section, I noticed a link to the “Official NWA website”. I clicked the link eager to see what goodies a website for a now defunct group might hold.

Airline Tickets… either NWA did much better for themselves then I ever imagined or the Amazon bot goofed.

I wonder if this is Northwest Airlines’ idea of marketing to minorities…

I often find myself shocked by the audacity of the tactics being used to dampen voter turn out. Then I remember that black folks have really only been voting for 40 years. As the Washington Post reminds us:

The democratizing change was to open voting to previously excluded groups, notably women and blacks. We often forget that while many Western states extended the vote to women beginning in the 1890s, all women didn’t get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920 and African Americans didn’t achieve full inclusion until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

For me, this isn’t about my ancestors being denied rights, some ancient wound. Rather, the wound is more recent and more direct - my father, my aunts and uncles, were denied these rights. When I think about it that way, I am less surprised. I am also more angry.

There has been much opining on the new Video for Eminem’s Mosh. I was blown away when I first watched the video. I think it was more shock than anything else. I was overwhelmed by the call to action, being spit by an entertainer who is best known for his nihilistic view of the world.

No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our soil / No more psychological warfare to trick us to think that we ain’t loyal / If we don’t serve our own country we’re patronizing a hero / Look in his eyes, it’s all lies, the stars and stripes / They’ve been swiped, washed out and wiped, / And Replaced with his own face, mosh now or die /If I get sniped tonight you’ll know why, because I told you to fight

Furthermore, I assumed that even Eminem wouldn’t just come out and say “Fuck Bush” as he does in this song.

I have a few issues with the video to be sure. And Tim Boucher has an interesting critique of the video. I have a few issues with the video to be sure. I think Eminem’s chorus is eerily messianic:

Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness / As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed / Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won’t steer you wrong / Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog / Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight, / We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp / We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors

Additionally, Eminem certainly simplifies the issues facing voters (the animation shows a soldier being reassigned to Iraq after serving out his tour of duty and a women reading an eviction notice while Bush is on t.v. touting his tax cuts) but, I think the shorthand is effective, and accurate.

In all, I am thrilled that Mr. Mathers decided to make this video. I do believe that in this day and age when many young folk are completely detached from politics, a video like this may spur thousands to action. I sure hope so.

Republican’s have recruited 3600 poll monitors to challenge voter qualifications in Ohio. The monitors are primarily being disptached to heavily minority populated districts. This quote made me sick to my stomach:

“The organized left’s efforts to, quote unquote, register voters — I call them ringers — have created [potential massive vote fraud].”

- Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman James P. Trakas as quoted in the NYTimes.

So let me get this straight, newly registered black folks who live in Ohio (and other swing states) are ringers? To call us ringers, Mr. Trakas, is to say that we have no legitimate place in this process. Your comment suggests that the election is to be fought among honest and competent white folks; that when the “organized left” registers minority voters, they are somehow cheating like a rec league team recruiting a professional ball player to help them win the championship.

Your comments are abhorrent Mr. Trakas. The “organized left” is not bringing people into the process that do not deserve to be there. Last time I checked, we were citizens too and, although we haven’t always had the right to vote, we do now. Much to your chagrin I am sure.

Just about every “fake headline” in The Onion is funny precisely because it isn’t fake. Incidentally, that is exactly what makes the Daily Show so funny as well.

With the knowledge that the minority vote will be crucial in the upcoming presidential election, Republican Party officials are urging blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities to make their presence felt at the polls on Wednesday, Nov. 3.

- The Onion (October 27, 2004)

In Maryland’s 2002 gubernatorial election, anonymous fliers were distributed in black neighborhoods in Baltimore gave voters the wrong date for Election Day…

- The Washington Post (August 25, 2004)