(Akiit.com) Hey, what happened to all those people who wondered whether Barack Obama was “black enough” to win black votes?

Now all I hear is people asking whether he’s too black to win white votes. Those who walk the highwire of crossover politics—black to white and back again—must strike a delicate balance. It was in the process of learning that balance that Barack Obama met the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Obama was learning how to be “black.” This much is for sure, he’s learning more all the time. One lesson he’s learning these days is how hard it is to be black without being thoroughly misunderstood by whites.

Years ago, Obama was trying to gain a better understanding of black folks when he met Wright in the first place. Ryan Lizza described the encounter in an excellent profile in the March 19, 2007, issue of The New Republic. He wrote that Wright was unimpressed when Obama the community organizer first approached Trinity United Church of Christ. “They were going to bring all different denominations together to have this grassroots movement,” explained Wright, a white-haired man with a goatee and a booming voice. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Do you know what Joseph’s brother said when they saw him coming across the field?’” Obama said he didn’t. “I said, Behold the dreamer! You’re dreaming if you think you are going to do that.’”

Obama’s problem was that he was trying to build a confederation of churches but he didn’t have a “church home” of his own. That means a lot among black church folks. One reverend put it to him like this, according to Lizza: “What you’re asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophesy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you’re getting yours from.”

Imagine Obama, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia with a white mother from rural Kansas, shopping for a church on Chicago’s Southside. He was intrigued by Trinity’s guiding principles—what the church calls the “Black Value System”—which included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.”

Ironically, contrary to its militant Afrocentric image in Washington’s punditocracy, some of the older pastors warned Obama that Trinity was for “Buppies”—black urban professionals—and didn’t have enough “street cred.”

Having visited Trinity and having friends who are long-time members, I personally find it has a refreshing mix from the upper class to the underclass. I am particularly impressed by its healthy proportion of young fathers. In too many black churches you find old folks, children and lots of women in between, and you leave wondering, where are all of the young men?

The mix of prophetic activism and traditional old-time black religion appealed to Obama as it appeals to many of us in the black community. The black church was founded in slavery as an underground church, a haven from the plantation. Black slaves and freedmen established their own congregations mixing Africa-rooted traditions with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the liberation imagery of Moses and the Children of Israel.

White pundits who grumble that they don’t go to church to hear politics obviously don’t feel the need for politics. The black church has a different tradition. While many black preachers speak only of personal salvation, many others speak of the prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power. Among other legacies, this prophetic wing of the black church produced the Underground Railroad, slave uprisings and the modern civil rights movement. Obama found the cultural community of black churches to be more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than his own brand of organizing.

Trinity gave Obama an extension of the street organizing education he had received at the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by late community organizer Saul Alinsky, which emphasized a focus on people’s self-interest.

“Sometimes the tendency in community organizing of the sort done by Alinsky was to downplay the power of words and of ideas when in fact ideas and words are pretty powerful,” Obama told Lizza, continuing, “’We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal.’ Those are just words. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. But they help move things. And I think it was partly that understanding that probably led me to try to do something similar in different arenas.”

What about Wright’s words? Yes, I’m troubled that Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor made remarks such as, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

But I’m more troubled by polls that show a substantial percentage of black Americans also believe that the government lied about AIDS. About half of black Americans surveyed in a 2005 study by Rand Corporation and Oregon State University believed that AIDS is man-made. More than a fourth said it was created in a government lab, and 12 percent actually claimed that the virus was spread by the CIA. The paranoids include black church members, according to polls as far back as 1990, when a New York Times/WCBS-TV News poll found that 35 percent believed AIDS was a form of genocide. Overall, one African American in 10 believed the AIDS virus was “deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people” and an additional 2 in 10 thought that might be so.
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(Akiit.com) So, we’re going to get honest about race this time? Let’s get started then. If only it were that simple.

We’ve had time to digest Sen. Barack Obama’s call for a new, and more frank, examination of the “complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked our way through.” Plenty of people, including some from opposite sides of the ideological fence, heard something in that speech that spoke to their hearts.

But a period of reflection makes clear that, when the power of rhetoric fades, we’re conflicted not just about race, but even how to talk about it.

Candor can help, some say; others worry fresh honesty will inflame old tensions. And who is qualified to join in this conversation? It depends whom you ask. Is this only a black-white thing, or is that too limited? Can different generations, with different experiences, hear each other on this issue?

To some it sounds like a conversation _ or an argument _ they’ve been having or hearing all their lives, and one that started long before.

We live by a Constitution that began, “We the People,” but declared black slaves worth only three-fifths as much as whites. From the Lincoln-Douglas faceoffs of 1858, which focused largely on what to do about slavery, to the most recent debate over renewing the Voting Rights Act, the rift over race and what to do about it has defined us.

“In some ways, he (Obama) is joining in a conversation already in progress,” says Kareem Crayton, a professor of law and politics at the University of Southern California.

It’s been a decade, in fact, since we set out to have the last national conversation on race. Consider where we are as we wonder how to embark on the next one.

Now is the time to wrestle with race again, says John Hope Franklin, the historian named by President Bill Clinton to lead the last effort.

Yes, says Ward Connerly, an activist who faulted the Franklin panel and has long pushed to end race-based affirmative action, it’s time for Americans to level with themselves and each other about race and the legacy our attitudes have created.

So, these past antagonists agree now? Only on the desirability of introspection. They still sharply disagree on how to wrangle with the issue that has vexed the United States since even before it was established.

To many, the conversation on race is one we’ve never really invested with enough candor or willingness to listen.

That’s clear to Jill Williams, former executive director of the Greensboro, N.C., Truth and Reconciliation Commission, formed to review the decades-old killing of five activists by the Klan.

In New York now, Williams says people hear about her experience and marvel that “racism remains so deeply ingrained in the South, and I say, ‘Oh I think it’s very much present here in New York,’ and they look at me with shock.”

Others say we need to have a conversation, but that focusing just on race, or only on tensions between blacks and whites, would be too simplistic and too divisive.

“The first thing we think about is color and that seems to negate anything else,” says Rodney Cooper, a professor at the Charlotte, N.C., campus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary who previously worked across race lines in the men’s evangelical group Promise Keepers.

“Let’s talk about who’s going to be talking about what.”

The Obama speech didn’t come close to answering that question. But it still gave people plenty to think about, with a poll by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News finding the public divided on whether Obama had said enough to explain his own feelings on race. The speech quickly became the most discussed video on YouTube, viewed more than 2 million times in less than 48 hours.

But, framed by their experiences, people took away very different things and offered responses that had clearly been percolating for some time.

Jay Love, a state legislator in Alabama, opposed a resolution last year apologizing for slavery because he disagreed with “apologizing for something that I didn’t have a part of.” Love is white and from Montgomery, a civil rights battleground. Growing up, race and it’s connection to political power were always part of the conversation, he says.

But unlike his parents, raised in a segregated world, Love says by the time he reached school, the student body was nearly evenly split between whites and blacks. His generation and the one that has followed are dealing with each other across race every day, and to begin a new round of highly charged debate about the past will not help move those relationships forward, he says.
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(Akiit.com) Are you the guy or gal that has to stop at Starbucks every morning to get that liquid rush? Would you just have the most terrible day if you were running late for work and had to skip it? If you are, than you make up an estimated 90% of Americans that need that fix everyday!

Despite recent controversy about alleged benefits of drinking coffee, you may want to reconsider your position upon considering some not-so pleasant long term effects.

Coffee contains nearly 200 chemicals. Many of these chemicals are oil based and therefore put an added stress on liver function. One chemical, caffeine has several different ill-effects on the body. Here are 4 reasons to kick your coffee habit:

REASON #1: In large amounts, caffeine can interfere with normal sleep patterns as well as become difficult for liver metabolism.

REASON #2: Caffeine in coffee consumed during mealtime, fools the stomach’s ability to secrete the needed amount of Hydrochloric Acid. This reduced Hydrochloric Acid often times contributes to an Acid Reflux response.

REASON #3: Caffeine stimulates adrenaline, the “fight of flight hormone”; however once it wears off, you face fatigue and even mild depression. So then you have to take more and more to get the adrenaline going again. That’s the typical addiction that you want to stop!

REASON #4: Although some studies have shown coffee may reduce your risk of developing breast cancer; coffee drinkers are also more likely to increase their risk of stomach cancer and leukemia.

These are just a few of the known effects that coffee can have on the body, but understand that coffee, with its hundreds of chemicals, affects each person differently and it is still a drug - even if legal!
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(Akiit.com) When it comes to America’s more than 100 historically black colleges, the Bush administration is giving with one hand and taking back with the other.

President George W. Bush signed a law in September adding $85 million to the annual support of $238.1 million for Spelman College, Grambling State University in Louisiana and the other schools, saying it would help low-income Americans earn degrees and prepare them to compete for U.S. jobs. The Bush administration’s new budget cuts aid to the schools by the same amount, angering Democrats who helped provide the money.

“It’s devastating, a devastating effect, these kinds of cuts,” Sen. Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Senate Education Committee, said in an interview in Boston. “It doesn’t make sense to cut back in terms of vitally needed education programs.”

North Carolina Central University in Durham says students who are training to become special-education teachers may see support for their program eliminated. Efforts to recruit minority students to become math and science teachers may be slashed at dozens of the colleges.

Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina gets about $4.2 million from the U.S. government, partly to provide tutors for chemistry and computer-science programs, said Everette Witherspoon, the university official who monitors such funding. The money, more than 4 percent of the budget, also supports an honors program and evening classes.

“They would be scaled back,” Witherspoon said. The cut would hurt efforts “to compete as a mainstream university.”

Education Department officials defend the conflicting policy actions, saying the cutback returns funding to previous levels.

“We have to make tough budget decisions in priorities with discretionary spending,” said Samara Yudof, a spokeswoman for the Education Department. “Our budget reflects that.”

The government defines historically black colleges and universities as those established primarily to educate African-Americans before 1964, when the doors to most institutions were closed to them.

Some were founded even before the Civil War, the oldest being Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, which began in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth. Today, they represent about 3 percent of U.S. colleges and universities and account for about one-fourth of all African-American college graduates.
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(Akiit.com) Semaj Williams, a stress-management consultant from New Jersey, feels Brazil in his past, and his present.

”It’s very clear to me that in another life I was Brazilian,” said the hulking Williams, seated on the shaded patio of a colonial convent-turned-upscale-hotel. “I’m sure of that: Brazil is one of my places.”

He is one of thousands of U.S. visitors, virtually all of them African American, who have journeyed to the cobblestoned lanes of this northeastern Brazilian town in pursuit of roots and a shared history.

With its varied and exotic attractions, Brazil has long been a travel mecca, drawing more than 700,000 U.S. citizens annually. But the big attraction for many black Americans is Brazil’s flourishing African heritage, most evident here in Bahia state, where vast slave plantations once serviced Europe’s craving for sugar and tobacco.

”The different African traditions have certainly been better preserved here,” said Paulette Bradley, a marketing manager who was visiting with a group from Atlanta. “It seems that African heritage was more diluted in the States.”

Black Americans’ increasing advance into the middle class has created disposable income, leisure time and a multibillion-dollar tourism boom. Brazil may not yet rival Africa as a ”roots” destination, but those keen for a cultural encounter are converging on Bahia.

”There’s a shared sense of the African diaspora culture, of being a product of the slave trade,” said Lisa Earl Castillo, an American scholar in Salvador, the capital of Bahia.

Despite barriers of language and culture, many African American visitors speak of a sense of empathy and identification with Afro-Brazilians. Folk practices still thriving here evoke for many the specter of slavery and its aftermath, calling to mind wisps of oral tradition passed down by long-dead grandparents and great-grandparents.

A must-see on the African American itinerary is this picturesque colonial town and its mid-August spectacle, the festival of Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte, or Our Lady of the Good Death. It is a classic incarnation of religious syncretism: Roman Catholic elements imported by the Portuguese coexist with Afro-Brazilian devotion, specifically the belief system known as Candomble.

Today, agencies specializing in African American tourism book rooms months ahead, filling hotels here and in Salvador, a two-hour drive to the southeast. Package deals with stops in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere are built around the festival in mid-August.

It is a date of raucous celebrations to the beat of drums and brass bands, including a vigorous samba de roda, a traditional dance performance in a circle. Afterward, participants feast on feijoada, the iconic, bean-based Brazilian soul food dish.
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