(Akiit.com) While roaming the net I came across a exercise site that sells diet pills… Got me thinking, as I have often wondered if fat burners actually work, etc… Shall see for myself soon, as I’m in need of losing a few pounds… Yeah the beer belly will be sliming down soon… Just playing, but I for one take pride in the way I look… Oh well, the game is about to come on, so let me end this note…

Written By CTA

(Akiit.com) WASHINGTON, DC — Josephine Baker looks straight at you with bright eyes and shining smile, fearless and demanding attention.

The time is 1935, and the St. Louis native who transfixed France and much of Europe with song and dance stares out from a poster advertising the film “Princess Tam-Tam.” Baker starred as a simple African woman presented to Paris society as royalty.

Baker’s movie is one of five recalled on a set of U.S. postage stamps being released Wednesday to honor vintage black cinema. Ceremonies marking the sale of the stamps will be held at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, which is holding a black film festival.

“So many things happened in her life that she had never expected,” her son Jean-Claude Baker said Tuesday.

“I guess that if she was with us today she would be very honored. At her death she was a French citizen, but she never forgot she was born in America,” he said in a telephone interview. “She would be delighted and very moved.”

“Despite all the difficulty of colored people in her time, she triumphed over all the adversity that she and her people had to endure,” he added.

Another poster, for a 1921 release, provides a taste of the racial divide that sent the young Baker to Europe to pursue her career.
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(Akiit.com) The Democrat’s message appears to resonate with, rather than alienate, black voters.

CINCINNATI, OHIO — Unswayed by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s disapproval, Sen. Barack Obama pressed his message Monday that African Americans needed to take more responsibility for their lives and families, a theme that had angered one of the icons of the civil rights movement.

Obama got a standing ovation at the annual NAACP convention here, presenting himself as a symbol of the political power that earlier black leaders had won. Touting the sacrifice of these activists, Obama said their courage had allowed him to “stand before you tonight as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America.”

But Obama, in diagnosing conditions in the black community, made it clear that he was prepared to break with the generation of black leadership represented by Jackson. He said that government and business alone couldn’t be blamed for the pain suffusing some black neighborhoods, but that black parents needed to show more maturity and demand more from their children.

Parents, Obama said, must provide “guidance for our children.”

He advised “turning off the TV set; putting away the video games; attending those parent-teacher conferences; helping our children with their homework; setting a good example.”

He continued that parents needed to teach “our sons to treat women with respect and to realize responsibility does not end at conception. That what makes a man a man is not the ability to have a child but to raise one.”

The largely black crowd roared its approval.

In his implicit criticism that some black men neglect their children, Obama showed he was prepared to endure a breach with his political base. The move could have an upside: White voters might see it as an example of courage.

The moment has a parallel in Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. Risking a backlash from his black supporters, Clinton criticized what he cast as racially divisive remarks from rap performer Sister Souljah. Clinton’s move also created a schism with Jackson.
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(Akiit.com) We can say that the Black woman has carried a great deal throughout our time in America.

Because the Black family has been under siege for that entire time, much was required of the Black woman.

Quite frankly, her strength is one of the reasons we have survived as a race where other races could not have.

We know that even up to and through the first half of the last century, the Black woman was holding things down while her man left psychotic violence and stark oppression in the South to pursue jobs and freedom for his family in the North before standing on the front lines in the Sixties to secure rights for his people.

But we also know that Welfare came to destroy the Black family by making it easier for the family to survive in the man’s absence.

And we know that integration helped to destroy the Black community, which was not prepared for Black flight or the devastation of Crack Cocaine nor the privatization of prisons.

We also know that feminist propaganda has silently polluted the minds of many Black women, who now view Black men as the enemy.

As a race, we’ve come through a great deal. And for the most part, we did it together.

The difference was that in previous times when Black men were under siege, Black women worked with them to hold the community together and we were all better for it. Now, many Black women feel that they have it all together, that they have done enough for “us” and that it’s time for Black men to get it together.

Any Black woman who is alive and under 50 today is under some beautiful delusion to pretend to be tired of suffering anything at the hands of Black men or tired of doing anything for Black men, because it just hasn’t happened in their generation.

Frankly, Black people as a race haven’t done anything for themselves in decades—it’s been all about self-preservation as individuals.

If you are a Black woman under 50 today, the heavy lifting was done by your grandmother, not even your mother. You haven’t run any slaves through an underground railroad, no one has legally raped and/or forcibly impregnated you, and you haven’t carried the burden of the race on your back.

Many of the Black women who claim to be tired haven’t even held a family together, if they even have a family of their own.

We didn’t begin to seriously deteriorate as a race—men or women—until the end of the Sixties, when many Negroes decided to become shiny and new and abandon everything remotely connected to the community.

Really, any contemporary Black woman who feels that she has been carrying the race is crazy because the race is doing worse than ever.

Yet, some of today’s Black women act so terribly put upon, as though they are perfect and Black men are holding back the race.

In response to my column called “Man Up,” chastising men to stand up and be men, one insane woman wrote “not only are we (Black women) ready…but a lot of ‘outsiders’ are ready for Black men to finally get their sh-t together, too.”

Really? Black women and the world are simply waiting for Black men to stop being lazy bags of crap? The answer, of course, is no.

But what is most disturbing is such a sentiment accompanied by little concern about the lagging of Black men.

Black women, even if you believe yourselves to be ahead of Black men, why aren’t you concerned about the hole in MY end of OUR boat? If you believe that we are sinking, you must realize that you will sink as well.

And while no thinking Black man has a problem with Black women working to improve the condition of Black women, the destruction comes with pretending that Black men are in some way holding Black women back.

Some Black women are even retelling the story of the Civil Rights Movement, claiming that it was oppressive to Black women, yet the only “evidence” of that is a quote from an obscure member of the Black Panthers, who admitted to being a rapist and a lover of white women, but who never represented any great portion of Black men–then or now.

In order to truly believe this lie, we have to ignore the Black women who were a vital part of the Movement. We would also have to ignore the FACT that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was the first time that the rights of women were mentioned since they were enfranchised.

And, we would have to ignore the FACT that Affirmative Action benefited Black women more than Black men.

But, really, the question is this: Why are we even having that discussion?

The answer is that some Black women find power in their own victimhood, which gives them an excuse for poor behavior, while accepting no responsibility.
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(Akiit.com) There is no question the civil rights and labor movements have shared a public commitment to issues of parity and justice affecting African Americans and working people over the years. Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King embodied that partnership when he led his last march for justice in support of the striking sanitation workers of AFSCME Local 1733 in Memphis.

But, it is also true that the union movement has been slow to practice what it preaches when it comes to equality within its own ranks.

In the early years of the labor movement, African Americans were systematically excluded from major unions, which led to the formation of separate Black labor unions. A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 and waged a 12-year fight to gain recognition by the American Federation of Labor. He went on to become a national leader in the fight against racism within unions, in the workplace and throughout America.

Those early barriers have slowly fallen and now Blacks represent about 14 percent of American union workers. But, at a time when African Americans are an increasingly important part of the organized labor’s future, they are still not adequately represented at the top echelons of the American labor leadership. But don’t take my word for it.

Listen to what William Lucy, AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer and the highest ranking African American in American labor has to say. In remarks to a 2005 national summit on labor and diversity in Chicago, Lucy said that at a time when the vast majority of new union members are women and people of color, “a majority of people of color still encounter barriers to gaining leadership positions within their union and even where they have reached leadership positions, they face additional challenges.”
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