if you don't tell them, then they won't know

"America is free to choose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity." -Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma

Recent events in my personal life (more like: events in the lives of people close to me) have brought home the absence of family values which I feel is plaguing my people in particular. The collapse of the black family is not a new thing, or something to be attempting to prevent. It is also not something that was beginning to happen 40 or 50 years ago, as Moynihan supposed...

No, to me the collapse of the black family began when our people were imported wholesale to a new foreign land, stripped of their language and culture and community, and forced into a life of servitude and arrested development for generations.

That is not to say that there could have been NO community when we were slaves,- but there's no doubt that countless traditions were lost; many values, norms, ethics and best practices became meaningless, useless, forgotten, or simply undoable - either due to lack of resources or lack of inherited knowledge and preparation... We didn't completely forget how to be a family in a community. But the loss of our original community and knowledge was an irreparable trauma...

Now I want to back up and say that, upon emancipation (and to a lesser extent, even before the abolition of slavery), it is clear that black families have/had survived and even thrived. Further, I am proud to be a participant in and heir of our dispersed diasporadic legacy...we are still beautiful despite the (figurative) nuclear bombing of our cultural identity that occurred as a few small-minded but unfortunately powerful people 'brought civilization to the savages',........ and I know that strong black families exist and will continue to.

However, I do feel that there is a lost sense of interconnectedness. Further, I have witnessed firsthand the consequences of weak family values/structure. Let's take me for instance....

I was raised by both of my parents for much of my life, but it is was not easy for them (to get along). Consequently I was sent to boarding school at the tender age of 7, and I attended that school until I graduated high school. The unfortunate economic situation that my parents found themselves in, I think, helped fuel domestic disputes which eventually drove them permanently apart...this tumult has obviously had profound effects on me, but I was sheltered from it for the most part, being away at school and all.

So I learned to survive in the world, but I did not learn to value my family... It's not that I was ever taught that family was unimportant.. I just never remember learning to put family first (something that I am still grappling with). For one thing: my extended family have been the antagonists in some of the worst tales of conniving, mistreatment and general misanthropy that I have witnessed/heard - and all too often our own family have been on the other end of such treachery.... That I didn't need to see much of my family very often, for me, became a good thing.... The further and longer I was away from home, well,- the further and longer I wanted to stay away. Through distance (or, perhaps, subconscious self-hatred that i may have had then) I learned to alienate myself.

Well, as I matured into an adult, things that my family had taught me were wrong became things that I thought were so right. In the past I also made decisions which effected my family - and I made these decisions while consciously ignoring how it might impact my family...

Now of course, things are different.

I am simply using myself as an easy example, but there are many reasons not to think of my situation as totally unique...Perhaps one might dismiss my selfish antics as good ol' youthful foolishness. Recent events have confirmed for me that there are plenty of examples and mine is not so unique. As far as youthful foolishness..there's nothing wrong with that...but you can be a foolish youth without forsaking your family.... It has taken me years to un-learn my (lack of) family values...but it has been more a result of watching and learning from others' cultures and families that I have been able to take the necessary steps....My family is close to each other, but they often don't seem to value this closeness..

I think that black youth in America must be taught to value their family or they won't... Some people will agree with what I'm saying; some will take it for granted that this already happens... But when we lost our original communities we also lost our family values,... or, at least, some of them... And some of us may have rebuilt these foundations anew...but some are seeing that the consequences of these losses are exponential and ongoing,..and in every day of our reality................ We have been seeing the effects as the causes, I think, but this problem started centuries ago. Thoughts?

blackerThan "facts" ...

Recently a friend pointed me to a story... it basically suggests that black women have no one to date since all the black men are incarcerated. Nonsense! What about me?! ;)

Besides that, my friend (we'll call her Ms W for now), is "super suspicious of this new interest in black women's dating prospects"...as it "seems like a way to subconsciously make black women feel bad about pursuing an education and career."
Needless to say Ms W is a well-educated black woman.

She also pointed me to another, perhaps more insightful article in the Atlantic that was actually written in response to this seemingly innocent (but dangerously naive) post on the OKCupid Blog.

The OKCupid post basically suggests, among other things, that black women have an uphill battle in the dating game, as their site data shows black women getting snubbed. This data is dangerously naive as it was a very popular post, and the bleak "facts" it "revealed" about black women became the central focus of a a Freakonomics blog post in the NY Times, and that was sourced by a TIME study which basically concluded the same thing.

Coates, in his Atlantic article, astutely points out, first of all, that "when black folks date online they don't go to OKcupid. They go to blacksingles. They go to soulsingles. Or if they're truly high post, they go to EliteNoire....Black people who are going to a site like OKcupid are generally black people who, with some exceptions, are open to interracial dating. But the same isn't true of white people on OKcupid." The bottom line is well put there: "I think that people passing this data around need to be really careful about using this study to draw inferences about the dating world of black women."

And Miss W wonders, "why so much focus on black women's dating prospects? Why did these articles come around so much after the obamas became our first family? Let's not let society see a happy middle-class married couple and think that's the norm. Let's paint black women as bitter, lonely shrews..."

Whatever the case may be, we just need to remember to be really careful about how quickly we digest the vast amounts of information which is constantly bombarding us. Just because it's printed (and just because you believe it) doesn't mean it's TRUE!

whats up with folderlisting macro

the single quotes ( '<' ) in front of the tal statments were necessary for posting this code on the blog$pot :)

'<'tal:entry tal:repeat="item folderContents">
 '<'tal:block tal:define="item_url item/getURL|item/absolute_url;
    item_id item/getId|item/id;
    item_title_or_id item/pretty_title_or_id;
    item_description item/Description;
     item_type item/portal_type;
     item_type_title item/Type;
...
   item_intro item/getIntroductionText; 
    ">

......
.....
'<'span class="description" tal:content="item_intro">intro'<'/span>
....
'

so item_intro should be returning the intro for each child, but here you can see that it only returns the intro for the parent:



although it clearly has no problem finding the children's title and description fields, which are stored differently (AnnotationStorage).... however it also finds the children's URL and also the LeadImage, which are visible in the screenshot///

managing portlets by content type....

what type are you?

pure ree-dik-u-lus-nessss!!!!!

http://andiamnotlying.com/2010/types-of-bitches/