I’m weird… I know that. If you read my blog entries over the past couple decades it’s pretty clear that I’m so far left of center that I barely even show up on the political chart. And I know that! There’s never going to be a president in my lifetime that matches my politics. At…
Teaching English is a pretty cool job. But it’s probably not the job most people think it is. In a perfect world, every day of teaching English would be about giving inspirational speeches while making students jump up on top of their desks. Really though my fondest dream as an English Teacher is to make sure none of my…
Recently, my friend, and frequent conference collaborator, AJ Ortega posted a story about one of his students complaining about a short story he assigned for them to read. The story was “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl or Halfie)” by Junot Diaz. AJ’s student felt that it was inappropriate for a teacher…
A few weeks back, a friend of mine posted a link to a link to a youtube video that was a clip from one of my favorite TV shows in recent time. In fact it may be my favorite moment of that series. It is a clip from the first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s newsroom, wherein…
tSo for the last couple of days, Facebook has been full of people talking about the Confederate Flag. First the push to get it taken down from the South Carolina capitol. Then several retailers (Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Sears and a growing list of others) said they weren’t selling it any more. Then there was a…
There’s a brief history of the American Civil War that most people know. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, an executive order marking all slaves in the United States as freemen. It went into effect on January 1, 1863. As the Confederate States didn’t recognize themselves as part of the Union, they basically…
My friend Rod posted a link today to this story of a high school teacher in Texas who resigned after she was suspended by the administration for using “the N-word” when chastising a black student. Now, if your first response is “good, that’s uncalled for. She should never work around children again,” then good. Welcome to…
So I’ve been seeing a lot of people post links to this video of this unknown woman (who, for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to call Mama Jackson, because, I’m sorry Miss Jackson…) beating the holy hell out of her unknown son (who I’m going to call JuneBug, because… well, if you’re black, you…
You know, it’s funny… I am all for using controversy to drum up press. If you want to be evocative in order to generate buzz and maybe get your product some free advertising, then sure… more power to you. It takes about two seconds of knowing me or reading anything I write to see that…
A funny thing happened to me the other day. I stopped by Phantom of the Attic, my local comic book store, on my way to campus (as I do every Wednesday). After getting my comics, I went across the street and got Subway for lunch and then I walked back to my car so i could go…
I’m sure everyone only pay attention to me on the internet because you want me to point out all the really important hard hitting news stories, right? So when I saw this one I felt like it was my duty to point it out. Apparently, Malia Obama has worn a T-shirt with the logo of…
Hey, do you remember that time when there was that Grand Jury convened to decide whether or not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the GJ decided not to and in response the people of Ferguson rioted and burned their own city to…
I can’t believe that I actually care about this. And I really can’t believe that I’m about to side with Iggy Azalea over Q-Tip… but I am. So apparently it’s a slow news day. I keep seeing people ranting about Iggy Azalea and how she apparently has failed to address the problem of racial violence…
top: Tamir Rice, Micheal Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford III. bottom: Darrien Hunt, Ezell Ford. Compliments: LiberalAmerica.org You know how I ranted a whole bunch about the Michael Brown incident over the last couple months? And a year ago, I ranted a bunch about Trayvon Martin? So you’d think I would…
Photo Credit: New York Times As I begin writing this, it is 5am and I have spent nearly 12 hours watching around the clock coverage of the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson/Ferguson, MO situation. I thought about writing about it yesterday before the decision came down (I’ve written about it a couple times before,…