¶ … Randall Robinson's book The Debt (2000) about the condition of blacks in America, he states that the United States owes reparations to the descendents of slaves. In The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other, written two years later, he moves the emphasis of obligation to other blacks in America. He urgently requests that black leaders and those who have made their way up the socio-economic ladder to work toward improving the dismal situation in urban settings. His plea of help is to the so-called "gated blacks," or those African-Americans who have been able to move up into the middle class, but have either purposely or subconsciously forgotten about those blacks who have become prison laborers in the continuously growing American Gulag.
Robinson leads readers through the life of Peewee Kirkland, a black New Yorker whose tough upbringing led him to a life of crime and to prison twice. Peewee turned his life around, and now he is reaching back to help other poor inner-city kids stay clear of crime and clean of drugs. That is what everyone must do, Robinson suggests: Reach back and lift up those at the bottom.
Robinson blatantly shows, through stressing the statistics of blacks in the prison system, how little the country has changed since the early slavery days. Instead of Southern plantations, blacks are now kept at bay under much worse conditions in crowded incarceration.
The term "gulag" was first used as describing U.S. prisons by Nils Christie in his book Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style. According to Christie, a person has difficulty knowing who are the worst criminals -- the men and women prisoners or the individuals who run the penal industry. The book details how the United States relies on the criminal justice system to enrich business interests by following the model of corporate America. From 1986 to 1991, the number of white drug offenders in state prisons increased by 110%. The number of black drug offenders grew by 465%. Blacks account for about 14% of the nation's drug users, yet they make up 35% of those arrested for drug possession, 55% of those convicted for drug possession, and 74% of those sentenced to serve time.
Henry Louis Gates in "Are We Better Off?" also notes the disparity between the haves...
Black Arts Known as the "artistic sister of the Black Power movement," Black Arts refers to the collective expressions of African-American culture during the 1960s and 1970s. Corresponding with the climax of the Civil Rights movement and the self-empowerment of the African-American community, the Black Arts was a politically charged yet aesthetically ripe collection of visual, performance, music, and literary art forms. Amiri Baraka is credited widely with the genesis of
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Politics makes strange bedfellows, we are told, with the implication that those brought together by the vagaries of politics would be best kept apart. But sometimes this is not true at all. In the case of the Black Seminoles, politics brought slaves and Seminole Indians politics brought together two groups of people who would - had the history of the South been written just a little bit differently - would
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Astrophysical Implications of Black Holes Astrophysics There is a tradition in science for phenomena that are once thought of as impossible or absurd, later become fundamental to the progression of science. The subject of black holes falls within this tradition. Stephen Hawking, a leader in physics, once claimed that the existence of black holes was impossible; later on, he became on the leaders at the forefront of research and topics related to
Ella Baker Barbara Ransby has written a thoughtful, analytical and very readable account about the uniquely important political life of American civil rights activist Ella Josephine Baker. The work is incredibly significant because Baker is one of those handful of people to whom very much is owed by very many. Beyond the documentation of a critical era in American history, the book is a seminal investigation of the history of the
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