WASHINGTON, Nov 11 (Reuters) – All recent U.S. military veterans and their families will now be offered in-state tuition rates to public colleges and universities throughout the country, the White House said on Wednesday.
Announced in honor of the U.S. federal holiday Veterans Day, which fell on Wednesday, the change is part of President Barack Obama‘s “steadfast commitment” to military families and aims to make sure veterans can both access and get the most out of higher education, administration officials said.
Officials also announced the launch of a revamped comparison tool to offer veteran-specific admissions statistics, which aims to help applicants better evaluate programs, and a new effort to curb deceptive enrollment tactics used by schools aiming to recruit veterans.
Cecilia Munoz, a top domestic policy adviser to the president, said while Obama is pressing his administration to push these changes forward quickly, he is also calling on Congress to move forward on three pieces of legislation to help improve veterans’ education.
“These pieces of legislation will really ensure that veterans have the opportunities and assistance to … realize the American dream,” Munoz told reporters on a conference call.
One bill would heighten standards for schools receiving G.I. Bill funds, while another would help protect G.I. Bill benefits for veterans whose schools close mid-term. A third, just introduced on Tuesday, would increase regulation of for-profit colleges, many of which target veterans.
“What we think this does is ramp up the accountability” of those schools, Munoz said, adding that it ensures “we are requiring a high-quality education for veterans that have served us well.”
article by Megan Cassella and Sandra Maler via huffingtonpost.com
Good Black News
There was a time when Melina Abdullah wanted to be the next Maxine Waters.
A year or two ago, I recognized that those middle-class aspirations are done,” Abdullah says now, in the soothing voice of a therapist or guidance counselor. “You can’t go in and yell at people or camp in front of the mayor’s house and go, ‘Now I’m running for office.’ I had to make peace with that.”
Abdullah lives in a three-bedroom house in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles with her three children. She drives a Volvo. She’s a tenured professor and chairs the Pan-African Studies department at Cal State Los Angeles. She’s a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first black sorority. She was appointed by Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas to the county’s Human Relations Commission. Abdullah, in other words, has more than a toe in the American middle class.
But Abdullah, who was born in East Oakland and whose dad was a union organizer and self-proclaimed Trotskyist, has chosen to immerse herself in the black working class and its struggles.
She’s not unlike most of the Black Lives Matter leaders — college-educated, middle-class black women who felt compelled to fight against police violence directed at the black community. “Our degrees won’t save us, our middle-class status won’t save us,” she says. “Who’s being killed? Andrew Joseph in Tampa, Florida. His parents are college-educated, middle-class people. Trayvon Martin was killed in a gated community. Aiyana Jones, 7 years old, sleeping on her grandmother’s couch. I have two little girls. How can you sit back? That’s how a lot of us feel. We’re really facing wartime conditions.”
In a nation where black women are still stuck at the bottom of the power structure, Black Lives Matter is the only major national protest movement to be led by them in modern times. It has in the past two years become the most prominent left-wing movement in the country, a persistent topic on the national news and in both Democratic and Republican presidential debates.
The Black Lives Matter movement also could end up having a significant impact on local, state and national elections — which might be cause for concern among politicians like, say, Mayor Eric Garcetti.
The national organization founded by three black women — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi — takes its cue from the local chapters; the L.A. chapter, in which Abdullah is a key figure, was among the first.
The elements of Black Lives Matters’s DNA — young, female, gay-friendly, artsy — set it apart from every previous civil rights movement.
Although the group prides itself on its leaderlessness, Abdullah is one of five or so black women who, having helped start the L.A. chapter, now serve as its chief organizers. Nearly all are rooted in academia or performance art — or both. Their rhetoric leans toward the highbrow, their tactics toward the theatrical.
“We’re fighting against white supremacist patriarchal society,” says Shamell Bell. “That’s why you need black women to fight it.”
Bell, who’s been involved in Black Lives Matter from the beginning, is perhaps its prototypical organizer. A 31-year-old former professional dancer and former student of Abdullah’s, she’s currently a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA. In a movement that draws on each of its members’ gifts and abilities, Bell often leads street protest dances. While occupying the mayor’s front lawn, she taught a group of activists Jerkin’.
Cullors, 32, who coined the now-global hashtag #blacklivesmatter, is a performance artist who studied religion and philosophy at UCLA. When she was just 17, she joined the Bus Riders Union, a somewhat iconoclastic advocacy group in L.A. that pushes for more funding for the bus system and less funding for light rail.
A distinctly working-class nonprofit, the Bus Riders Union was Cullors’ entry into political organizing. She later started Dignity and Power Now, a coalition that fought brutality by sheriff’s deputies who work inside the county jails.
Cullors grew up in 1990s Pacoima, a low-income northeast San Fernando Valley neighborhood, during the height of the federal war on drugs that disproportionately imprisoned thousands of minorities. Cullors’ father and brother were in and out of prison for most of her adult life.
“That really shaped my understanding of what it meant to be black in this city,” Cullors says. “I had a lot of anger. And I was clear that I wanted to do something about it.”
In Los Angeles, Black Lives Matter has emerged as Mayor Eric Garcetti’s fiercest antagonist. Garcetti was elected without much support in the black community, which backed Wendy Greuel. But Garcetti will almost surely need the backing of black voters should he run for higher office, as is widely assumed.
“Whether he’s running for governor or U.S. senator, the political calculus that his consultants are going to use is that the black vote in Los Angeles can put him over the top,” says Dermot Givens, a political consultant. “Which is why he has to do everything he can to solve this situation.”
Garcetti, who appears galled by this vocal new opposition from the left, has dealt with Black Lives Matter rather clumsily.
After 25-year-old Ezell Ford, who’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was shot to death in August 2014 by LAPD officers in South L.A., the group camped out on the front lawn of the mayoral mansion in Hancock Park. Garcetti made the news, along with Black Lives Matter, when he was caught on video trying to sneak away in a black Suburban SUV.
Bizarrely, when the well-to-do, Encino-raised Garcetti finally met with these black leaders in July, he at one point started speaking to them in Spanish. In the eyes of the organizers, it was as if he saw all minorities as the same and dealt with them accordingly.
“[Garcetti] does a really good job at tokenizing people,” says Black Lives Matter co-founder Cullors. “He does a really good job placating. But he doesn’t actually do the work that it takes to change the culture and change policies that are anti-black.”
“There’s been a shift in politics in the black community,” says Givens, who argues that Black Lives Matter has not so much caused this shift as it has reacted to it. “And the mayor is playing old-school politics. He’s surrounding himself with old-school black people who have no idea what’s going on.”
The origin of Black Lives Matter dates to July 13, 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Icon!
Or is it Hardware rocketing through the skies, or Static Shock surfing on his big, floating garbage lid?
These three Black superheroes soon will return to a comic book store near you. If all goes well, cartoons, television appearances, movies and toys will follow.
That is the message that Milestone Media and DC Comics has been leaking out, by dribs and drabs, all year long.
Industry professionals Denys Cowan, Derek Dingle, Dwayne McDuffie and Michael Davis planned Milestone in the early 1990s as an independent, African American-owned and controlled comic book. It launched instead as an imprint of one of the “big two” publishers, with a special arrangement between Milestone and DC. It was hailed as a pioneering event in the comic book world.
Milestone would have total creative control over its comics, retain the copyright to all of its characters and have the final say on merchandising and licensing deals, according to the deal. Marvel and DC, the Coke and Pepsi of the comics industry, had dabbled in creator-owned projects before. But a deal of that size and scope was unprecedented.
The arrangement was “very unique in that it allowed Milestone access to a complete system of distribution and promotion while still maintaining a great deal of independent control over the content of the books,” Jeffrey A. Brown, Bowling Green University professor and author of BlackSuperheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans, said to Urban News Service.
The agreement “proved beneficial to both DC and Milestone,” Brown said. It “facilitated the Static Shock animated series,” which ran for 52 epi
sodes on the WB Network from 2000 to 2004. It also “kept the characters alive with occasional appearances in the DC Universe after Milestone closed down.”
Milestone’s comic book line launched in 1993 and went on hiatus in 1997 after giving readers hundreds of individual issues. Why did it shut down? “The various titles published by Milestone had a very dedicated fan following but the glut of new publishers over-saturated the market,” Brown said.
Despite rapid expansion, the American public’s interest in comics waned in the late 90’s, partly due to fascination with the still relatively new internet. Dozens of comic book companies and thousands of comic-specialty retailers went bust.
Now, thanks to television, social media and stronger story lines, comics are in another growth phase. The number of shops has risen and other distribution channels have emerged and improved. You can buy individual issues at comic book stores, digital comics for your tablet — via Amazon or ComiXology — and graphic novels are now seen as a legitimate genre of literature.
President Barack Obama, already known as the first U.S. president to advocate for gay rights during an inauguration speech, just became the first Commander-In-Chief to pose for the cover of an LGBT magazine.
Gracing the cover of OUT magazine’s OUT 100 issue as “Ally of the Year” comes as no surprise — Obama is likely to go down in history as one of the most progressive presidents, if not the only one who has fought so tirelessly for LGBTQ rights. Shortly after taking office, Obama signed a bill repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. And in June, after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide, Obama delivered an emotional address to the nation, calling it a “victory for America.”
“This is the first time a sitting president has been photographed for the cover of an LGBT title, a historic moment in itself, and a statement on how much his administration has done to advance a singularly volatile issue that tarnished the reputations of both President Clinton and President Bush,” OUT’s editor-in-chief Aaron Hicklin wrote.
Obama granted the magazine an interview that highlighted his own upbringing and how it affects his perspective on equality.
“My mom instilled in me the strong belief that every person is of equal worth,” Obama told Hicklin. “At the same time, growing up as a black guy with a funny name, I was often reminded of exactly what it felt like to be on the outside. One of the reasons I got involved in politics was to help deliver on our promise that we’re all created equal, and that no one should be excluded from the American dream just because of who they are. That’s why, in the Senate, I supported repealing DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act]. It’s why, when I ran for president the first time, I publicly asked for the support of the LGBT community, and promised that we could bring about real change for LGBT Americans.”
He also discussed how daughters Sasha and Malia have helped him recognize the generational shift in attitudes towards the LGBTQ community, urging for the end of damaging conversion therapy for young people that doesn’t allow them “to be who they are.”
“To Malia and Sasha and their friends, discrimination in any form against anyone doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t dawn on them that friends who are gay or friends’ parents who are same-sex couples should be treated differently than anyone else,” Obama said. “That’s powerful. My sense is that a lot of parents across the country aren’t going to want to sit around the dinner table and try to justify to their kids why a gay teacher or a transgender best friend isn’t quite as equal as someone else. That’s also why it’s so important to end harmful practices like conversion therapy for young people and allow them to be who they are. The next generation is spurring change not just for future generations, but for my generation, too. As president, and as a dad, that makes me proud. It makes me hopeful.”
You can read the full interview here.
article by Christina Coleman via newsone.com
Queen Latifah and Jermaine Dupri are on the hunt for the next big hip hop sound in the industry.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the duo is putting in work on a new unscripted series called The Rap Game. The eight-episode series will follow five aspiring young artists navigating the vast Atlanta hip hop scene and mentored by some of the greatest names in the game.
Dupri, who acts as producer on the show, has tapped the likes of Usher, Ludacris, Da Brat, T.I. and Silento to help guide the pupils each week, showing them how to better hone their crafts.
The goal for the young hopefuls is to secure a record contract with So So Def.
article by Matthew Wright via thegrio.com
Suzan-Lori Parks, who teaches creative writing at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, has been chosen as the winner of the 2015 Gish Prize, established through the will of the late actress Lillian Gish. The prize, considered among the top honors in the arts, comes with a cash award valued at $300,000.
The Gish Prize Trust said that Parks’ work “challenges contemporary conceptions of race, sexuality, family and society, and is distinguished by its striking wordplay, vibrant wit, and uninhibited style.” Parks will be honored at a ceremony on November 30 at the Public Theater in New York.
Parks is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is a former MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” winner. Professor Parks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her play “Topdog/Underdog.”
article via jbhe.com
Three of our all-time favorite black girls have been named to TIME’s annual 30 Most Influential Teens list. Malia Obama, Zendaya Coleman, and Amandla Stenburg are honored by TIME for their “accolades across numerous fields, global impact through social media and overall ability to drive news.”
The oldest First Daughter, Malia, is described as a “full-fledged cultural icon” by TIME. That title is perfect for the first daughter whose fashion choices and college visits are followed by millions of Americans. Like her parents, this 17-year-old Obama has big things ahead of her.
Former Disney Channel star Zendaya Coleman earned her spot on the list for emerging as a positive voice and role model for girls everywhere. She unapologetically reminds the media body positivity. In this year alone she eloquently schooled E!’s Giuliana Rancic for mocking her dreadlocks at the Oscars and shared unretouched photos from a magazine photoshoot.
17-year-old Amandla Stenburg lands a spot on TIME’s list for being a bold active critique of pop culture. Earlier this year the talented actress known for her role as Rue in “The Hunger Games” made the video “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows” which detailed cultural appropriation in pop culture and went viral. Not only is Amandla a talented actress and pop culture critic, she is also a musician and author.
Congratulations to these young women! We can’t wait to see the continued impact they will surely have on society!
article via theculture.forharriet.com
These days Cleveland Cavaliers’ superstar LeBron James is sporting smaller game shorts and a tighter-fitting jersey as a way to help shape the future.
The four-time MVP has done some self-reflecting in recent years. He’s observed the changes in the NBA, which led to questioning himself: Am I doing all that I can? Am I truly leaving my imprint on not only the game, but also the league?
“I’m always thinking about ways I can be of help,” James told cleveland.com. “That’s what it’s about, making sure you’re doing your part.”
James has proven to be more than just an athlete, as he’s the most socially conscious athlete of this generation with his willingness to voice his opinion on issues of the day.
His personal objective is making a difference, on the court or off of it.
This season he trimmed his uniform shorts by a couple inches, and had his jersey made snugger than in years past. He had expressed to those close to him he wants to leave the baggy look behind and place a renewed emphasis on professional appearance when it comes to the size of his uniform as well as his pregame and postgame attire.
When he arrives for work at The Q, he typically wears a sportcoat. It’s his way of reaffirming that it’s a business atmosphere. Professionalism and conduct were a main focus of the Cavaliers’ pre-regular-season team meeting in late October.
As James is the biggest name in the league and arguably in all of sports, he feels an obligation to shift the minds of kids on what is considered fashionable and acceptable. The kids who will play in the NBA in the future look to today’s players as role models.
When it’s all said and done, if James goes down as the best basketball player of all-time and that’s the extent of it, he’d consider that a failure of a career.
Growing up in Akron, he has seen the effects of poverty and a lack of education. He’s witnessed how senseless murders affect families for generations and he’s seen the effects of people who could have had an influence doing nothing to put a stop to it.
“I have a calling, man,” James told cleveland.com. “Everything I do is for the people I love. I was just brought up that way.”
James can’t force change, but he can force people to think and take notice. It’s pretty cool to dress professionally, and he wants everyone to know that.
article by Chris Haynes via cleveland.com