Yasiin Bey-formerly known as 'Mos Def'

So, one of the greatest MC's in the game-now known as 'Yasiin Bey' debuts his single and the visual for 'Ni**as in Poorest'. A play off of Jay and Kanye's 'Ni**as in Paris' Watch the Throne album single. He takes a stark look at what's happening stateside with some social commentary. Check it!

'Black' or 'African-American'?

Some blacks insist: 'I'm not African-American'

By JESSE WASHINGTON | Associated Press – Sat, Feb 4, 2012

The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the movement of a people from the slave house to the White House. Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the past: "black."

For this group — some descended from U.S. slaves, some immigrants with a separate history — "African-American" is not the sign of progress hailed when the term was popularized in the late 1980s. Instead, it's a misleading connection to a distant culture.

The debate has waxed and waned since African-American went mainstream, and gained new significance after the son of a black Kenyan and a white American moved into the White House. President Barack Obama's identity has been contested from all sides, renewing questions that have followed millions of darker Americans:

What are you? Where are you from? And how do you fit into this country?

"I prefer to be called black," said Shawn Smith, an accountant from Houston. "How I really feel is, I'm American."

"I don't like African-American. It denotes something else to me than who I am," said Smith, whose parents are from Mississippi and North Carolina. "I can't recall any of them telling me anything about Africa. They told me a whole lot about where they grew up in Macomb County and Shelby, N.C."

Gibré George, an entrepreneur from Miami, started a Facebook page called "Don't Call Me African-American" on a whim. It now has about 300 "likes."

"We respect our African heritage, but that term is not really us," George said. "We're several generations down the line. If anyone were to ship us back to Africa, we'd be like fish out of water."

"It just doesn't sit well with a younger generation of black people," continued George, who is 38. "Africa was a long time ago. Are we always going to be tethered to Africa? Spiritually I'm American. When the war starts, I'm fighting for America."

Joan Morgan, a writer born in Jamaica who moved to New York City as a girl, remembers the first time she publicly corrected someone about the term: at a book signing, when she was introduced as African-American and her family members in the front rows were appalled and hurt.

"That act of calling me African-American completely erased their history and the sacrifice and contributions it took to make me an author," said Morgan, a longtime U.S. citizen who calls herself Black-Caribbean American. (Some insist Black should be capitalized.)

She said people struggle with the fact that black people have multiple ethnicities because it challenges America's original black-white classifications. In her view, forcing everyone into a name meant for descendants of American slaves distorts the nature of the contributions of immigrants like her black countrymen Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay.

Morgan acknowledges that her homeland of Jamaica is populated by the descendants of African slaves. "But I am not African, and Africans are not African-American," she said.

In Latin, a forerunner of the English language, the color black is "niger." In 1619, the first African captives in America were described as "negars," which became the epithet still used by some today.

The Spanish word "negro" means black. That was the label applied by white Americans for centuries.

The word black also was given many pejorative connotations — a black mood, a blackened reputation, a black heart. "Colored" seemed better, until the civil rights movement insisted on Negro, with a capital N.

Then, in the 1960s, "black" came back — as an expression of pride, a strategy to defy oppression.

"Every time black had been mentioned since slavery, it was bad," says Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Reclaiming the word "was a grass-roots move, and it was oppositional. It was like, 'In your face.'"

Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s, and lingers today in the names of some newspapers and university departments. But it was soon overshadowed by African-American, which first sprouted among the black intelligentsia.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American mainstream in 1988, before his second presidential run.

Berry remembers being at a 1988 gathering of civil rights groups organized by Jackson in Chicago when Ramona Edelin, then president of the National Urban Coalition, urged those assembled to declare that black people should be called African-American.

Edelin says today that there was no intent to exclude people born in other countries, or to eliminate the use of black: "It was an attempt to start a cultural offensive, because we were clearly at that time always on the defensive."

"We said, this is kind of a compromise term," she continued. "There are those among us who don't want to be referred to as African. And there also those among us who don't want to be referred to as American. This was a way of bridging divisions among us or in our ideologies so we can move forward as a group."

Jackson, who at the time may have been the most-quoted black man in America, followed through with the plan.

"Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical, cultural base," Jackson told reporters at the time. "African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."

The effect was immediate. "Back in those days we didn't talk about things going viral, but that's what you would say today. It was quite remarkable," said the columnist Clarence Page, then a reporter. "It was kind of like when Black Power first came in the '60s, there was all kinds of buzz among black folks and white folks about whether or not I like this."

Page liked it — he still uses it interchangeably with black — and sees an advantage to changing names.

"If we couldn't control anything else, at least we could control what people call us," Page said. "That's the most fundamental right any human being has, over what other people call you. (African-American) had a lot of psychic value from that point of view."

It also has historical value, said Irv Randolph, managing editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, a black newspaper that uses both terms: "It's a historical fact that we are people of African descent."

"African-American embraces where we came from and where we are now," he said. "We are Americans, no doubt about that. But to deny where we came from doesn't make any sense to me."

Jackson agrees about such denial. "It shows a willful ignorance of our roots, our heritage and our lineage," he said Tuesday. "A fruit without a root is dying."

He observed that the history of how captives were brought here from Africa is unchangeable, and that Senegal is almost as close to New York as Los Angeles.

"If a chicken is born in the oven," Jackson said, "that doesn't make it a biscuit."

Today, 24 years after Jackson popularized African-American, it's unclear what term is preferred by the community. A series of Gallup polls from 1991 to 2007 showed no strong consensus for either black or African-American. In a January 2011 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 42 percent of respondents said they preferred black, 35 percent said African-American, 13 percent said it doesn't make any difference, and 7 percent chose "some other term."

Meanwhile, a record number of black people in America — almost 1 in 10 — were born abroad, according to census figures.

Tomi Obaro is one of them. Her Nigerian-born parents brought her to America from England as a girl, and she became a citizen last year. Although she is literally African-American, the University of Chicago senior says the label implies she is descended from slaves. It also feels vague and liberal to her.

"It just sort of screams this political correctness," Obaro said. She and her black friends rarely use it to refer to themselves, only when they're speaking in "proper company."

"Or it's a word that people who aren't black use to describe black people," she said.

Or it's a political tool. In a Senate race against Obama in 2004, Alan Keyes implied that Obama could not claim to share Keyes' "African-American heritage" because Keyes' ancestors were slaves. During the Democratic presidential primary, some Hillary Clinton supporters made the same charge.

Last year, Herman Cain, then a Republican presidential candidate, sought to contrast his roots in the Jim Crow south with Obama's history, and he shunned the label African-American in favor of "American black conservative." Rush Limbaugh mocked Obama as a "halfrican-American."

Then there are some white Americans who were born in Africa.

Paulo Seriodo is a U.S. citizen born in Mozambique to parents from Portugal. In 2009 he filed a lawsuit against his medical school, which he said suspended him after a dispute with black classmates over whether Seriodo could call himself African-American.

"It doesn't matter if I'm from Africa, and they are not!" Seriodo wrote at the time. "They are not allowing me to be African-American!"

And so the saga of names continues.

"I think it's still evolving," said Edelin, the activist who helped popularize African-American. "I'm content, for now, with African and American."

"But," she added, "that's not to say that it won't change again."

___

Anonymous Posting by a Female...What are Your Thoughts?

Your Resume

 Anonymous

I have said before that men are like jobs. If this is true, which it is; then your body is your resume. When you submit your resume to an employer you are careful to ensure it has your qualifications well highlighted, keywords throughout, and the right balance of length and depth. The key to any good resume is making it so powerful and captivating that you get the interview. Your resume does not get you a job but it does get you in the door. It guarantees you time in front of the employer so that you can further discuss and give greater explanation as to how you will perform in the job. Once you’ve submitted your resume, and had your interview it’s still up to the employer to decide if you will be a good fit for the job and the company, thus extending you an offer. I am explaining this in great depth because men are no different.
Just like an HR coordinator sees hundreds of resumes for a job posting, men see hundreds of women throughout their life. Their ultimate job opening is of course that of a mate or a companion. This is a tough job to fill and they must sift through many women aka resumes just to narrow the search. While I would love to lie and say that men look at the whole embodiment of a women to determine if she will get an interview, this is not the case. Men are visual creatures. We know this. They have a short attention span similar to children, small playful dogs, and HR coordinators who need to get through several resumes in a short time frame. Just as the HR staff looks for key words, men look for key things to determine if you are worth the time and money of an interview or a date. While key words on an actual resume might be something like: project management, communication skills, presentation skills, iCloud, and customer service. Key words for a man are not words at all but features ie. boobs, ass, waist, hair, eyes, smile, legs, and feet. Is this shallow? Maybe. But there are hundreds of women how else would one narrow his search and get through everyone. This brings me to the point of considering your own resume. Is it job posting ready? Is the best of you highlighted? Have you determined what your key words are and have you looked into gaining skills to add to your list? This is important. I’ll give an example.

You are overweight. You know it. You are still attractive but you are overweight. Some men like big women, of course this is true. But realistically, most men like healthy women. I am not suggesting every woman be a size 0. This is ridiculous, unnatural, and impossible. I am suggesting however that every woman be healthy and be the smallest she can be without killing herself. Get mad if you want! Tell me I’m wrong if you want. I don’t care. I’m not the one wondering where a man for me is. By getting to a healthy size you are only getting another key word to add to your resume and widening the net for potential job placement. Will you find a man who will accept you for being overweight? Possibly. Will your “job search” take a lot longer? Include more guys that you might not even like? Most likely. Just as in a job search your only goal with your resume is to get as many interviews as possible. You want to be the decision maker, choosing from job offers, not hoping to get chosen. You want to be turning men down, not wondering why you can’t even get an interview/date. Start by working on your key words. You are already fabulous, I don’t doubt that. You do however need an opportunity to show this to a man and that won’t happen if your outside doesn’t peak his interest for a date.

The same goes for your hair, your clothes, your skin, everything external. You’ve only got a few minutes tops before the next girl/resume walks through the door. You’ve got to show your best so you get the interview/date not the chick next to you. This may sound crazy but give it some real thought and work on updating your resume; the interviews will start rolling in. Then you’ll have the opportunity to show everyone just how great you really are.

Old Man Getting It In...Singing Some Hits

I'm not sure if you've seen this, but this guy goes by the tag name HelenRuth31 and loves to 'cover' tunes by R. Kelly, Babyface and in this case Usher Raymond. He also covers 'Return of the Mack'-remember that one? LMAO!!!