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As part of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Progress Administration, more than 2,000 first-person accounts of slavery were collected, as well as 500 black and white photographs.

This week we return to one of our favorite themes: This Week! All of the stories in the show are things that have taken place in the last seven days.

Colleges and universities — not to mention many businesses — have been pushing for gains in the numbers of black and Latino students who earn doctorates, especially in STEM or social science fields.

A new study may point to one hindrance in making progress toward this goal. Black and Latino graduate students are more likely to borrow and more likely to borrow larger sums to earn a Ph.D. than are white or Asian graduate students. The figures are particularly striking for African Americans and for STEM fields.

The study was released Monday by the American Institutes for Research and is based on data on all U.S. citizens or permanent residents who earned doctorates in 2010. Data were analyzed for STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and for SBE fields (social, behavioral and economic sciences). For each category of disciplines, the study examined whether new Ph.D.s had graduated without debt, with a modest amount of debt (up to $30,000) or with large debt ($30,000) from graduate education.

Here are the results:

STEM Ph.D.s and Debt, by Race

Debt LevelWhite and AsianBlackLatinoNo debt73%51%64%$1 to $30,00017%24%22%More than $30,00010%25%14%

The researchers note that either no debt or minimal debt appears to be the norm for white and Asian Ph.D. recipients, but not other groups. Black Ph.D. recipients in STEM fields are more than twice as likely as are white and Asian Ph.D. recipients to accrue more than $30,000 in debt in graduate school.

Social Science Ph.D.s and Debt, by Race

Debt LevelWhite and AsianBlackLatinoNo debt44%21%34%$1 to $30,00021%21%23%More than $30,00035%58%44%

In the social sciences, where there is less outside support for doctoral education than in the STEM fields, a greater proportion of new Ph.D.s have borrowed than is the case for STEM graduate students. Still, however, racial and ethnic gaps jump out. White and Asian Ph.D.s, for example, are more than twice as likely as black Ph.D.s to earn their doctorates without debt.

As I write this, Istanbul is under siege. The might of Istanbul’s entire police force—the largest city police force in Europe—is violently cracking down on peaceful occupiers in Gezi Park.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

May 30, 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – Yesterday afternoon, Miranda state governor and former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles met with Colombian president Juan Santos in Bogota.

After Capriles first announced the visit yesterday, Venezuelan foreign minister Elias Jaua accused Capriles of going to Colombia to put together “economic sabotage plans in Venezuela”.

Jaua said the meeting between Capriles and Santos was a “step towards derailing” relations between Colombia and Venezuela, and denounced that a “conspiratorial process” against Venezuela was underway in Colombia.

“We didn’t want to believe that this conspiracy had reached the highest powers of the Colombian state,” he said, warning that it was a “bad sign” that the Colombian government “received the person who convoked violence [after 14 April elections]”.

Further, Jaua warned that the Venezuelan government will “re-evaluate” its role in accompanying the peace process between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The Santos government and the FARC have been in a process of dialogue since October last year, with Norway and Cuba facilitating the process, and Venezuela and Chile accompanying it.

“It’s difficult to work for the peace of a brother people when its highest institutions are encouraging and feeding into destabilisation in Venezuela,” Jaua said.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

BOGOTA, Colombia – Venezuela recalled its ambassador and ended its participation in peace talks Wednesday after Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos met with the losing opposition candidate in Venezuela’s recent presidential election.

Santos received losing candidate Henrique Capriles at the presidential palace in Bogota. Capriles has charged that the Venezuelan presidency was stolen from him in the April 14 election by the apparent winner, Nicolas Maduro, the late President Hugo Chavez’s handpicked successor.

Maduro and Capriles, who has demanded a recount, have exchanged harsh words since the election, and Chavista lawmakers came to blows during a session of the National Assembly month. Opposition politicians have travelled extensively to other Latin American nations to criticize the election.

Diosdado Cabello, the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, told a state TV reporter in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, that Santos’ amicable reception of Capriles represented a “bomb on the train of good relations with Venezuela.”

Capriles also received a cordial reception from Colombian legislators Wednesday in a visit to the national Congress in Bogota.

In a statement on national TV, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said his government was offended by the meetings and had ordered an immediate halt to its involvement as facilitator in peace talks underway in Cuba between the Colombian government and the country’s largest rebel group, known by its Spanish initials, FARC. Venezuelan diplomat Roy Chatterton has been recalled from the process, Jaua said.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

WASHINGTON — America’s working mothers are now the primary breadwinners in a record 40 percent of households with children — a milestone in the changing face of modern families, up from just 11 percent in 1960.

The findings by the Pew Research Center, released Wednesday, highlight the growing influence of “breadwinner moms” who keep their families afloat financially. While most are headed by single mothers, a growing number are families with married mothers who bring in more income than their husbands.

Demographers say the change is all but irreversible and is likely to bring added attention to child-care policies as well as government safety nets for vulnerable families. 

latinegrasexologist:

h/t to @yayayarndiva

What we now know as Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. It was a tradition initiated by former slaves to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause.

These days, Memorial Day is arranged as a day “without politics”—a general patriotic celebration of all soldiers and veterans, regardless of the nature of the wars in which they participated. This is the opposite of how the day emerged, with explicitly partisan motivations, to celebrate those who fought for justice and liberation.

The concept that the population must “remember the sacrifice” of U.S. service members, without a critical reflection on the wars themselves, did not emerge by accident. It came about in the Jim Crow period as the Northern and Southern ruling classes sought to reunite the country around apolitical mourning, which required erasing the “divisive” issues of slavery and Black citizenship. These issues had been at the heart of the struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

To truly honor Memorial Day means putting the politics back in. It means reviving the visions of emancipation and liberation that animated the first Decoration Days. It means celebrating those who have fought for justice, while exposing the cruel manipulation of hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members who have been sent to fight and die in wars for conquest and empire.

Read more here.

afrodiaspores:

withrevolutionarycries:

deluxvivens:

wakeupblackpower:

“Chicken bones. Conferring with spirits and ethereal deities. Visions of graveyard rituals. These are the images movies and superstition have conjured about the practitioners of the religion of voodoo, or Vodoun.

Unlike Judeo-Christian religions, Vodoun encompasses all areas in a person’s life and incorporates intricate rituals for even the smallest daily routine. The religion stems from natural religions cultivated and handed down from generation to generation in Africa. Largely based on general concepts such as “nature” or the “spirit,” Vodoun is the predecessor to American voodoo. The name “voodoo” is actually a term created by those who saw the religion as evil, but it has derived from several sources, including “Vodou” in the Fon language and “Vudu” in the Ewe language. All told, more than 30 tribal groups in West Africa subscribed to the religion.

OK i’m not feeling this article at all. Starts off about voudun but then talks about “ase”; yoruba based religion and fon based religion are *not* interchangeable. And also I know its not hip in some circles to talk about Islam in Africa but plenty of enslaved Africans were muslims and stayed that way the best they could. I suggest people read Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas.

reblogged for the critique

While I appreciate the thrust of the original piece and am grateful for the conversation it has opened up, I would want to build on the critiques concerning Islam and Yorùbá traditional religion thus far by noting that Central African groups were among the first to arrive in the Americas as slaves. Culturally and linguistically Bantu-inspired traditions not only contributed to the development of Vodou in Haiti and hoodoo in the United States, but also inform ‘Kongo’ traditions in the Caribbean and Latin America, such as Afro-Cuban Palo Monte. To add another layer of complexity to the situation, some of those enslaved persons from the Kingdom of Kongo had already converted to Roman Catholicism by the end of the fifteenth century as the result of Portuguese missionization, so Christian aspects of Afro-Diasporic traditions (the use of crosses in Espiritismo, chromolithographs of saints in Lucumí, and so forth) are not always an imposition from above or matter of dissimulation. Of course, this remains a challenge to the popular historiography on these issues, yet the scholarly consensus has been turning towards this view with the recent publication of several new monographs, especially about Central Africans in the “New World.” 

randomactsofchaos:

ATTLEBORO — As many as 25 students at Coelho Middle School were denied meals or told to throw their lunches away Tuesday because they could not pay or their pre-paid accounts did not contain enough money, school officials said today.

Parents said some of the children cried after they were not allowed to eat or had to toss out their lunches.

School officials said an on-site employee from Whitson’s, the school system’s school lunch provider, apparently gave the order not to extend meals to students who could not pay or whose credit was already overextended. SOURCE

Imagine, for a second, the mindset required to force hungry children to throw food in the garbage? It’s not like the food was given to a child that could pay, it was just wasted. It’s the ultimate in conservative thought: I will gain nothing from this but the satisfaction of knowing you did not get a free meal.

This is why privatizing government functions is a bad idea is almost every circumstance but particularly in those that provide a direct service. Once a profit motive is introduced, it ceases to be about fulfilling a public need, now it becomes about making a profit by any means necessary. The idea of providing children a nutritious meal so they can grow and learn and contribute to society becomes a narrow and selfish pursuit of the bottom line. If children are left to go hungry, well, that’s capitalism for you!

It’s not as if they couldn’t feed them, the district has a policy where a student that can’t pay for the regular meal will be provided with a cheese sandwich and milk. It’s not the most appealing of meals but it will certainly keep a child fed. But instead, this privately run company decided that over twenty kids simply shouldn’t eat if it was going to cost the company money:

Parents said they were told by their children that some pupils in the cafeteria line had already picked up their lunch and were told at the checkout they had to throw it away.

Victoria Greaves, 11, a fifth grader at Coelho, said a cashier told her to throw away her lunch because there was not enough money in her account. She said she threw her meal away and got nothing to eat.

We’re left to wonder what the cashier planned on doing if the child refused to comply. Would they physically take the food away? Was the couple of dollars really that important?

The larger question that isn’t being asked yet is how did we come to a point where anyone can even think that depriving children of food is a moral thing to do? In the richest nation on Earth, are we so blinded by greed and the pursuit of the Holy Dollar that we don’t even consider that going out of our way to let a child go hungry to be the act of a sociopath? Would we rather throw food in the garbage than let someone eat it for free? Who thinks that way?

House Republicans recently proposed cuts to nutrition assistance that will kick 280,000 low-income children off automatic enrollment in the Free School Lunch and Breakfast Program. Those same kids and 1.5 million other people will also lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamp benefits) that help them afford food at home.

Ah. Well, that explains that, doesn’t it?

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

ANTAKYA, Turkey (Reuters) - Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of the Turkish city of Antakya on Sunday, a day after bombs killed nearly 50 people in a nearby town as Syria’s civil war spills into the region.

Several hundred people, mostly leftist and nationalist demonstrators, marched through the center of the city no more than 50 km (30 miles) from the Syrian frontier, carrying banners and shouting anti-government slogans while onlookers cheered.

The protests came after two car bombs ripped through the center of Reyhanli on Saturday, a border town less than half an hour away and the latest flashpoint in the spread of violence from Syria, killing 46 and wounding scores more.

Ankara has blamed fighters loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the attacks and said they will not go unanswered.

But many in this frontier province of Hatay, a melting pot of sectarian, ethnic and religious groups, some of whom share Assad’s Alawite creed, blame their own government and its policy on Syria for the bloodshed spilling onto Turkish soil.

Turkey has taken in more than 400,000 Syrian refugees, many of whom have settled in Hatay, and has thrown its full weight behind the armed opposition fighting to overthrow Assad, although it denies supplying weapons.

Fighters are able to cross back and forth across the frontier virtually unchallenged, unsettling many on the Turkish side of the border, who say more and more radical groups are joining the opposition ranks.

“We have a message for our people: We will rid our city of the jihadist murderers,” read one of the protesters’ banners.

“Hands off Syria,” read another, with a picture of Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and U.S. President Barack Obama wearing military helmets with a fighter jet in the foreground.