(Akiit.com) We Must Be Especially Vigilant Regarding Slavery and the Civil Rights Movement…

I am history buff and I tend to get intensely anger when I see or hear lies and frauds being pushed as “true” history. Sometimes I am left confused as to whether the people pushing these frauds, especially regarding Black history, are just ignorant of the truth or actually know the facts but deliberately try to play the rest of us for fools.

Regardless, I want you make as one of your new year’s resolutions for 2011 to write, call and correct authors, reporters and politicians who spread historical falsehoods regarding Slavery and the Civil Rights Movement.

Here are a few examples:

Recently, while commemorating Confederate history in South Carolina, Henry Kidd – a member of a Confederate heritage group – said the reason his state seceded from the Union in 1860 was because “They wanted to preserve the rights, interests and honor of the South. Slavery didn’t have anything to do with it.”

This is one of the greatest lies ever told. The central issue which drove the Civil War was slavery. Challenge anyone who suggests that the South was fighting for state’s rights or honor. The 11 Southern states were fighting to maintain slavery. Indeed, in their own Declaration of Causes to secede, the desire to maintain Blacks in slavery is mentioned 31 times.

Next, challenge anyone who dares to honor the Confederacy. The confederates attempted to destroy America by seceding from the Union. They set in motion a Civil War which cost 650,000 lives. And never forget that their goal was to keep Blacks in perpetual slavery. These people can never be honored. They do not represent Southern pride; they represent Southern racism.

In this regard, you must write and correct President Barack Obama. In May of 2009, the nation’s first African American president – in a crass political move – sent a wreath to the Confederate Monument in Arlington Cemetery near Washington, D.C. Obama was following a tradition set in motion in 1919 by then President Woodrow Wilson. Obama said as “president of all the people” he felt it was his duty to honor those who had fought in America’s wars.

This is an absolutely ridiculous and almost “uncle-tomish” explanation. Again, the Confederates were not “our” soldiers. They were trying to destroy the United States of America and establish a slave nation. Further, once they lost the Civil War, they returned to the South; started the Ku Klux Klan and launched a 100-year reign of terror against Blacks and their white supporters.

There was no excuse for what Obama did. A group of scholars wrote him a letter clearly detailing the fact that the monument was a testimony to racism: “The monument was given to the Federal Government by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which raised the funds to erect it. The UDC’s reasons for the monument are instructive. In the address of Mrs. Daisy McLaurin Stevens, President General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at its dedication, she makes clear that the monument is to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy.”

Tell Obama to send no more wreaths honoring Confederate soldiers!

Last week, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2012) said of race relations in his hometown of Yazoo City during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement of 1960s “things weren’t that bad.” I ask you, Mr. Barbour, “How do you know?” You were a privileged white kid in the 1960s. Only the victims of Mississippi racism can authoritatively talk about how bad things were.

Challenge any white person who dares to suggest that the racisms of the 1960s “weren’t that bad.”
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(Akiit.com) Well, it’s that time again. You’re watching the year come to an end, and preparing for the annual ritual of the New Year’s Resolution to lose weight. Let me share some helpful information to make this coming year the one where you actually meet your weight loss goals.

When you think of weight loss and losing weight, the first things that probably come to your mind are either those “lose weight fast”. Maybe you’re thinking of all of those weight loss pills that claim to be safe and allow you to “eat whatever you want and still lose weight because the pill will do all of the work for you”. Or, maybe you’re thinking of rice cakes and never eating and being hungry all day long.

Weight loss is simple, burn more calories then you consume. If you can fully understand that then you are on your way to losing weight. There are 6 simple steps. Here they are:

1) Count how many calories you eat in a normal day. That’s right, wake up, and eat like you would normally eat and count the calories in everything you eat and everything you drink and keep track of it on a piece of paper or on the computer some where. You might be thinking to yourself, “yeah right, I’m not gonna sit around counting calories all day.” Well, if you’re thinking that, then you’re obviously not dedicated enough to losing weight. If this is the case, then feel free to go waste your money on the newest useless weight loss pill. But, if you are dedicated enough to take 10 minutes out of your day and count the calories, then keep on reading.

2) At the end of that day, add up the number of calories you ate/drank. Be as exact as possible. Once you add it all up, you now have the total number of calories you consume daily. Also, weigh yourself.

3) Starting the day after you counted calories, eat 500 calories LESS then you normally do. So, lets pretend that the day you counted calories you counted 2000. For the rest of the week, you would eat 1500 calories a day. Understand? All you have to do is subtract 500 from the total number of calories you consume in a normal day, and eat this new number of calories every day for the next 7 days.

4) Instead of eating 3 big meals a day (breakfast, lunch and dinner), or eating all day all the time, spread those calories out over 5 smaller meals. Eat one meal every 2 and a half to 3 hours. Doing this will speed up your metabolism.

5) Cardio is an important part of weight loss. If you’re serious about losing weight, but don’t want to do the cardio workouts, then you are requiring your diet to do all of the work. Jog, walk, swim, jump rope, ride a bike, take an aerobics class, whatever… cardio + proper diet = better than just doing one of the two. All it takes is 30 minutes a day, 3 – 5 days a week. I say 3-5 days a week because I don’t know if you have 5 pounds to lose, or if you have 50 pounds to lose. So, depending on how much your looking to lose, figure it out. 3 times a week is good starting point though.

6) At the end of that week, weigh yourself. You’ll notice a difference just after one week! Now, don’t expect to see a 20 pound difference. Losing anymore then 1 or 2 pounds a week is unhealthly. So look for a 1 or 2 pound weight loss at the end of the week. Don’t sound like much? You can lose 5-8 pounds a month! That’s around 75lbs a year! So if you have A LOT of weight to lose, you can lose it. If have just a few pounds to lose, you can lose it also.

Now, a couple of words about those “FATS” and “CARBS”:

- THE BAD FAT MUST GO! Stay away from “bad” fat! Get rid of all the chips and candy. No more fast food, nothing fried. No more cookies, no more cake, no more of these saturated fats. There is no question about it and there is no way around it, get rid of these types of foods. Don’t get me wrong, you should NOT be eating 0 grams of fat every day, but the only places you should be getting your daily fat intake from are lean meats (not the fried fast food kind), chicken (again, not fried!), etc. as well as the foods that contain the “healthy” types of fat, which can be found in just about every type of fish (tuna fish, salmon, fish oil supplements, etc.), nuts, olive oil and flaxseed oil.
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(Akiit.com) It’s puzzling when poll results show that blacks tend to view abortion through a conservative lens. A Wisconsin ad campaign likening the black abortion rate to genocide throws the contradiction into stark relief.

Ryan Bomberger was born of a rape nearly 30 years ago. He is alive today because his biological mother made a choice, he says, to put him up for adoption rather than have an abortion.

He is grateful, though he realizes the choice was not easy. For one thing, the young white woman lived in a mostly white community in Pennsylvania, and her attacker was a black man. As a result of the incident, she became emblematic of the moral politics of reproductive rights in a battle that erupted after the passage of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion 37 years ago, and rages on today.

Now her son, a pro-lifer who is chief creative officer of the Radiance Foundation, stands on the front lines of a battle in Milwaukee. Bomberger and members of Pro-Life Wisconsin say that African-American women have a disproportionate share of the abortions performed in their state. About 6.2 percent of the population is black, yet 24 percent of all state abortions are performed on African Americans, according to Pro-Life Wisconsin.

The groups are engaged in a campaign against abortion, similar to one launched in Georgia earlier this year. It includes 13 billboards, each featuring one of two messages: “Black Children Are in Danger” or “Black & Beautiful.” Each billboard is emblazoned with an image of an African-American child and lists in bold letters the name of the website, toomanyaborted.com, which is part of the Radiance Foundation.

“The ad campaign really does stem from my own background of having been adopted,” Bomberger told The Root. “It’s also based on the history of eugenics that [decided] certain people weren’t fit to live because they would only serve as a detriment to society. I defy that whole sort of mentality, which is why certain groups don’t like … us.”

The national disparity in abortions is even more staggering. Overall, African-American women account for 36.4 percent of all pregnancy terminations in the United States, although blacks make up only 13 percent of the population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency attributes the higher abortion rate among blacks to a higher incidence of unintended pregnancies.

But is that the whole picture? Consider this: Nearly two-thirds of African Americans polled believe that abortion should never be legal or should be legal only in cases of rape or incest or when the woman’s life is endangered, according to a 2004 poll by Zogby International. (This compared with 56 percent of respondents overall and 78 percent of Hispanics.)

We asked Dr. Carl C. Bell, a clinical professor of psychiatry and public health at the University of Illinois, to weigh in on the apparent contradiction between behavior and opinion. It isn’t difficult to reconcile the conflict between the high rate of abortions among African Americans and polls that show most blacks do not support pregnancy terminations, he replied.

Bell, like the CDC, blames the disconnect on unintended pregnancies. Yet the poll results include the responses of everyone — male and female, young and old, those in the phase of life when people get abortions and those who are at the stage of life when people reflect back on the choices they made.

Women in their 20s account for more than half of all abortions: Those who are ages 20 to 24 obtain 33 percent of all abortions, and those who are 25 to 29 years old obtain 24 percent, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

“When you are under 26 or in your 20s, your brain is dominated by emotional directives,” says Bell, who treats youths and has been in practice for more than 40 years. “At that age, you’re all gasoline with no breaks or steering wheel, so your hormones are in control.”

However, not only are the pollsters talking to 20-somethings; they are also talking to older churchgoing, middle-class conservatives, some of whom likely had abortions or supported their partners’ abortions as youths and are against them today because of the moral backlash. For these older people, there are also physical and psychological repercussions, including the hurt and anguish of having aborted a child.

“They aren’t polling 20-year-olds in the hood,” Bell surmises. “I’d like to see that happen. And some of these saved, black churchgoing people can be even more tyrannical than members of the Tea Party. What were they saved from? I would venture to guess from the very same behavior they so ardently oppose today. That’s why you see the conflict in the poll numbers. People always say one thing and do another. And when they get to a certain age, they expect people to do as they say.”

Some black pro-lifers, such as Bomberger, believe that the conflict has a more nefarious cause. “I’ve done research that could not be explained by socioeconomic factors,” he says.

Bomberger and others like him accuse white abortionists of exhorting black women to obtain abortions as a form of genocide. Planned Parenthood is one of their targets. But Planned Parenthood officials view pro-lifers as obstructionists who do not want to educate people about the importance of contraception.
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(Akiit.com) When I was a child, my mother recognized that the public school system was never going to give me an adequate education in the area of black history, so in order to fill in the gaps we frequented the library and she made sure I read more than what I was assigned in class. Knowing of my history and pride in my culture was instilled at a very early age.

But as “black and proud” as we were, one thing my family has never done is celebrate Kwanzaa. As a matter off fact, my immediate and extended family has largely dismissed and derided the “celebration of family, community, and culture” often joking that it is not a “real” holiday and referring to it, mockingly, as “Black Christmas.” For a long time, I encountered this sentiment in nearly every black person I knew.

I didn’t understand why, and that can be attributed to my ignorance regarding what Kwanzaa actually was. I knew it was a holiday, I knew it lasted seven days, I knew it started after Christmas, and I knew it had something to do with black people. Outside of that…nothing.

Created in 1966 by professor and activist Dr. Maulana (Ron) Karenga, Kwanzaa is an outgrowth of the black nationalist politics of the 1960s, where people of African descent living in the United States began to assert their rights to humanity, and further, the right to ownership over their culture and communities.

Black nationalism taught us to reject that which was imposed on us by mainstream (read: white) cultural institutions and build our own institutions that reflected our voices, values, and heritage. Kwanzaa was born of this thinking and is meant to “serve as a regular communal celebration which reaffirmed and reinforced the bonds between us as a people in the U.S., in the Diaspora and on the African continent, in a word, as a world African community.”

The weeklong holiday introduces its participants to the Seven Principles (that are translated from Swahili), which are: Umoja (Unity), Kuji-chagulia (Self-determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), and Imani (Faith).

Even as it has gained in popularity, Kwanzaa still isn’t an enormously popular tradition among the constituency for which it was intended. There are no official statistics on how many people celebrate the holiday, thought I’ve seen numbers of ranging from 2 percent of African-Americans to 30 million people worldwide. I personally know more people who celebrate it at this stage of my life, but all of them espouse or possess an intimate knowledge of black nationalist ideas.

E. Franklin Frazier’s “black bourgeiosie“, or the so-called black middle-class, or those possessing a more mainstream, less “radical” political and cultural ideology, have not embraced Kwanzaa. For many, the idea of Kwanzaa is connected to the idea of black people wanting to have something to call their own and haphazardly throwing together something that resembles a mythical, romanticized “Africa” and subsequent identity, but lacks any real purpose, message, or foundation. Whether a case of elitism or assimilation, Kwanzaa garners little respect from the keepers of black middle-class values.

Even among those who may be empathetic and would otherwise embrace the principles and cultural ideas that Kwanzaa holds, there are those who do not acknowledge it due to sketchy past of the holiday’s creator. Karenga was sentenced to one to ten years in prison for torturing two women followers who he accused of attempting to assassinate him. For some, Karenga’s violent and sexist past too much to overlook to embrace is creation.
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(Akiit.com) Indeed it was a nice christmas… So bless to be with family and friends… Love the new mattress the wife got for our bedroom… Kids were jumping for joy… Yes Santa Claus came through… They are spoiled indeed… Well I see facebook is still going strong although it’s the holidays… A few friends posted Merry Christmas messages, etc… I’m loving this iphone… The screen is crystal clear and I can surf the net so easily… Also apple music store is a killer…

Written By CTA