(Akiit.com) Over 50 years ago, Jackie Robinson’s recruitment into major league baseball marked the beginning of what might be called a Golden Era for African Americans in professional sports. Over the last decade, however, that era appears to be coming to an end.

Later, I’ll touch on why this seems to be the case, but first, here are a few observations on recent news stories that, primarily because of their wide and ongoing coverage — and the fact that African-Americans are so often stereotyped — the stories are somewhat symbolic of that decline.

Of course, the big news in baseball is Barry Bonds. Despite breaking Hank Aaron’s homerun record (and the beloved Babe Ruth’s in the bargain), Bonds’ home plate bombs may not count for much in the annals of the sport. In fact, due to his alleged steroid use, many fans and sports officials question whether or not he should ever be admitted into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

In the larger picture, however, African-Americans are slowly disappearing from major league baseball. In 1975, the numbers of African-American players on major league rosters reached a highpoint of 175. Their numbers have been steadily declining since. Today, there are only 90 African-Americans in the major leagues, while the number of Hispanics and other people of color more than doubles that.

In pro football, Atlanta Falcons’ star quarterback, Michael Vick, has dug a pit he may never be able to climb out of. As most know, Vick has confessed to financing vicious dog fighting matches and, in so doing, has all but guaranteed that his next uniform will be a striped one.
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WASHINGTON (Akiit.com) – More than 100 years since W.E.B. DuBois declared that the “color line” would be the key problem of the 20th Century, civil rights activists and race experts now say the problem of racial tensions are still so pervasive in the 21st Century that some have labeled it as a resegregation.

“It’s undeniable that we are resegregating education in a dramatic way and we are also resegregating or becoming more segregated residentially than we were. And so those things are clearly going backward,” says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racial hate activities across the nation. “I don’t think race-relations are doing terrifically well.”

Potok says what appears to be a rise in racially charged incidents publicized this year alone coincides with the rise in race hate groups nationwide.
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(Akiit.com) Black suicide can be lessened through the influence of religious communities, according to new UA research.

The study done by UA sociology professor Kevin Fitzpatrick intended “to focus the question on whether or not religion was important, particularly in a community where religion has been, and often still is, playing a central and unifying raole across generations.”

“Historically, we know that the church has been an incredibly important institution around which the Black community has unified,” Fitzpatrick said.

For examples of this, history professor Calvin White points to the leaders who emerge out of the Black community such as Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

“It’s no coincidence,” White said, “that these men are all ministers and the position of the church as a leader, although perhaps declining slightly, is still huge among Blacks.”

White, whose research deals specifically with Blacks and religion, said it is the “unique struggle of Blacks in this country” which has made religion so powerful a factor.

Facing hardships and overcoming obstacles was central to day-to-day existence of Blacks and, in many cases, still is, White said.

“You may be barefoot on Earth, but you’ve got shoes waiting in heaven,” and suicide is a denial of the struggles essential to the Black identity, White said.
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(Akiit.com) PBS’s Washington Week host and managing editor Gwen Hill posed that question at an August 10 panel discussion titled “What Does It Mean to be a Black Man?”

Perhaps no segment of the American population has been more analyzed than Black males. They have been the subject of dozens of academic studies and government boards and commissions. Negative images of Black men over the years have often been planted in the public mind in various forms and fashions.

Lately, Black men have been variously depicted as the progenitors of pop culture and the menaces of society. Given all this attention, is it a good time to be a Black man today? PBS’s Washington Week host and managing editor Gwen Hill posed that question at an August 10 panel discussion titled “What Does It Mean to be a Black Man?” during the recent National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) annual convention in Las Vegas.

The panel featured three Black men: Hill Harper, actor and star of CBS’s CSI: NY, FBI Executive Assistant Director Mike Mason, and Washington Post associate editor Kevin Merida. Washingtonpost.com Investigative Projects Editor Tanya Ballard was the female panelist.

Too many young Black males today believe that material things make them important, said Harper. “[Black men] are aspiring for things, thinking that if you have them, they will make you whole,” he explained. “We come out of a culture where ambitions and a Black man’s self-worth oftentimes are linked to the size of the rims on his car, platinum Rolex…all the way down to his sperm.”
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(Akiit.com) I think that black folk who want to assimilate need to be honest about this. All too often, black folk are assimilating and promoting assimilation but are refusing to be open about what they really stand for.

Why is it so difficult for black people who assimilate to acknowledge that this is what they believe in? Perhaps it is because they know – at least on a subconscious level - that assimilation is extremely destructive to the black community; they realize (as bell hooks has noted) that assimilation is a “strategy deeply rooted in the ideology of white supremacy.” On a deep level they may recognize that assimilation is a form of mentacide, that is (in the words of Bobby Wright) the “deliberate and systematic destruction of a group’s minds with the ultimate objective being the extirpation of the group.”
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