A few months ago, I was taken aback by a wildly problematic post that was part of Danielle Belton’s “Unconventional Wisdom” series on her popular blog, the Black Snob. The problems in that entry, on integration’s destruction of “black community” and HBCUs in particular, were glaring and easy to knock down. It augured very poorly Read More
Because of technical difficulties and an unusually busy work day, this almost became Your Tuesday Random-Ass Roundup. Sorry I’m late again. Your PostBourgie-approved weekend reading material: First things first, Stacia, one of our co-bloggers, is writing a novel and posting a chapter a day at her personal blog. What is this space for, if not Read More
I’ve been chomping at the bit to get to our discussion of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes, this month’s reading/discussion group pick. The book follows the efforts of Geoffrey Canada and his audacious Harlem Children’s Zone program, a formidable array of proactive social programs that Canada hopes will lift every child in Harlem into college Read More
[via.] Over at the the City Room blog, a social worker muses about race and class after an incident on the train. A young woman, about 18 or so, is hitting her 4-year-old repeatedly. Before long, her friend joins in. The writer stepped in and yelled at her to stop. As you might imagine, things devolved Read More
There was plenty to criticize in Ross Douthat’s column last week about Sarah Palin’s resignation as Governor of Alaska. He argues that because she’s got no fancy degrees and is aggressively anti-elite she represents a democratic, as opposed to meritocratic, ideal. Plenty of people did. But Freddie at the League of Ordinary Gentleman perhaps unfairly Read More
Average Bro points to a program in North Carolina that pays teenage girls a dollar a day to not get pregnant. The group College-Bound Sisters was founded at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro by Hazel Brown, a maternity nurse who thought too many teens were having babies. Brown said she hopes the program, Read More
Don Cornelius would like a word with you. Don’t make any dinner plans. In the meantime, your Post-Bourgie-approved reading material from the weekend: 1. Of course, homage must be paid to the King of Pop. But we will try to spare you from the overkill. Check out some really good write-ups here, here, here, here, Read More
Last Thursday, I finally had my oft-rescheduled wisdom tooth surgery, which is why I haven’t been blogging. It’s apparently a more complicated procedure once you’re over the age of 20; your bottom wisdom teeth sit next to a nerve and extracting them after they’ve fully grown means you run the slight risk of minor facial Read More
(by Jeremy Levine, and x-posted from Social Science Lite.) In Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Jeff Chang chronicles the historical roots of contemporary hip-hop culture. Chang notes the decline of industrial America, the rise of crack, and the prevalence of urban street gangs as three major antecedents to hip-hop. To be sure, it wasn’t gangs themselves Read More
I’ve long suspected that part of the reason that aspirational Negroes rail against ghetto folks is actually to reify that stereotype, and consequently give relatively banal middle class lifestyle choices the weight of much-needed social uplift. (It’s why you see portrayals in the media of professional black folks with traditional nuclear families reflexively celebrated as Read More
