Daily Archive

Things might be getting a big nasty soon.  It’s not like they’ve been cordial now but a quick perusal of news stories over the last 24 hours in the Clinton-Obama drama shows:

1) Clinton still can’t get over the Richardson endorsement of Obama.  Bill, you gave the man a cabinet job over 10 years ago, let it go.  People deserve to move on and have their own mind and career.  Haven’t you ever heard of the maxim, “If you love something, let it go… ” Let it go!

2) Jimmy Carter seems to be swinging Obama’s way.  I don’t think Carter ever really liked B. Clinton anyway.  Carter can expect some nasty comments coming his way from the Clinton camp after its done; perhaps downplaying his work for Habitat for Humanity or his work for Peace in the Middle East.  Do the Clintons even remember there’s another Democrat president still alive?

3) Clinton tells the Superdelegates that Obama can’t win.  Yeah, he might be winning the popular votes and the delegates but he can’t bring it home in November like she can.  Remember, she won Ohio, California and Rhode Island.  States that count (remember states whose votes count always vote for H. Clinton.  The other states who voted for Obama, their votes don’t really count.

4)Obama raised 40 million for his campaign in March.  The Clintons made 50 million since leaving the White House but aren’t releasing their tax forms to tell how.

But then, how much did she make in March?  Is she still lending her campaign money?

5) A recent shows the age gap in voting.  In a match-up between Obama and McCain, Obama has the upper hand with voters 18-29 with 57% showing preference for Obama, but at the other end with the 65+ set McCain has the edge with 51 percent favoring him.

A matchup with Clinton-McCain shows a closer race with H. Clinton barely edging out McCain with young voters and McCain narrowly escaping defeat over Clinton in the other age brackets.

The real question that I’m dying to find out the answer to is how H. Clinton can spin this to her advantage-disadvantage at the same time?  If anyone can do it, she can.

I remember back in the 80s local African American singers/bands who may have had a hit or two (or no hits at all) picking up and touring Asia for months that turned into years.  They love us over there, a band member told me.  You can be just a cover singer and have a good fan base. 

A lot of Korean American singers are following their lead.  One of the hottest singers on the K-pop scene right now is Pennsylvania native Tim Hwang.  His current album “Love Is…” is burning up the charts.  The 26 year old has a sweet and innocent look that resonates well with Korean fans. 

It’s a shift in styles that some Korean Americans aren’t able to make.  American Idol hopeful Paul Kim, who has been unlucky with American labels, also tried to make a go of it in Korea.  In an interview with KoreaAm magazine Kim discussed his short time in South Korea on a Korean record label.

 “It was just rough. They wanted me to do pop and R&B, which I didn’t want to do. Like ‘N Sync stuff. I guess that’s what sells over there,” Kim said.  Kim is a soul singer who wasn’t interested in changing his genre of music.  In the end the deal ended up not working out.

So if our edgier style doesn’t always hit over there can Korean Americans become stars there and come back and make a sweep here?  Doesn’t seem like it.  Towards the end of the KoreAm article it recounts Tim performed at a gala and some in the audience found the performance “pleasant but dull”.

Well, sounds like he won’t be opening up for Kanye West anytime soon, but he sounds like a perfect match for a Disney tween TV-show.  Ask Hillary Duff and Hanna Montana, that is really how you can break in hard nowadays.

With the success of street dance shows like American’s Best Dance Crew and, to a lesser extent, So You think You Can Dance I can see this movie Planet B-Boy being a hit.  Check your local listings to see when this movie is coming to a theater near you.

Just like with rap, it astonishes me how a something started in the streets by black youth has now reached world wide proportions.  Who knew?

In a grassroots struggle there comes a victory that soon becomes a clarion for those who have become weary and when it is uttered the warriors gird themselves and continue to fight on, in remembrance of that one victory that seemed somewhat elusive during the throes of battle.

The rallying cry for this year is Dunbar Village.

I vaguely remember hearing about Dunbar Village last summer on NPR’s News and Notes.  I was aghast but to me it seemed like an open and shut case when they finally caught the young men.

But it is never an easy case when someone wants to throw out the race card.

The case is so unspeakable it pains me to retell it here, but in a brief synopsis a 35 year old woman and her 12 year old son was terrorized in her home by 10 masked men.  For one night they beat her, raped and sodomized her and, as if it couldn’t get any worse, at gun point made her perform fellatio on her own son.  To cover up the act the young men (ages 14-1 threw cleaning agents on the woman

They were able find a couple of the young men and DNA linked them to the crime.  That should be it, case solved.  But no.  In early March, Al Sharpton and a crew of protesters stood outside the State Attorney’s office complaining that the punishment was too harsh and that the young men should be free on bond, similar to another case in Florida where a couple of young men from Boca Raton helped to intoxicate two young women and once inebriated raped them.

“To have different reactions to the same set of circumstances is a crime in itself,” Sharpton said.

The protesters believed the only reason the men in the Dunbar Village were still in jail was because they were black and the men in Boca Raton were white.  They wanted the black men back out on the streets.

For the last several weeks, what has started out as a slow Internet buzz has created a war.   So much so that on his radio show Al Sharpton clarified his position by saying he didn’t want bail for the alleged assailants and the West Palm Beach NAACP released a statement denouncing the crime and refraining from asking for the young men’s freedom.

The Palm Beach Post has also noted that a group of 30 black female bloggers is keeping this heinous case in the news.

In the meantime the women blog on and have issued their own statement for what they want to see happen to the case.  It has been posted on 30 different blogs for women who want change.

So what happened?  Al Sharpton and the NAACP are both staid fixtures of the civil rights movement.  But both of them are about as current as Sharpton’s ‘do.  The knee-jerk reaction has always been when in doubt, support the black male even when (or some would say especially when), as in this case, the victim happens to be a black female.  Before discovering whether release in this case would be the best thing for the alleged perpetrators and the community, it was quickly decided that the punishment didn’t fit the crime or couldn’t fit the crime because someone who had done something vaguely similar wasn’t in jail, too.  We are so used to believing that black males are victims of an unfair justice system that we erroneously side with the criminals instead of the victims.  Too often the victims are the weakest in our community: black women and children.

For those too lazy to click the link here is the open letter about Dunbar Village.  Please join your voice to those who have been silenced in our community for far too long.  To keep abreast of the latest information on Dunbar Village, click on one of the links below.

Open Letter 3/28/2008 Update: A New Underground Railroad is Born