Yearly Archives: 2013

InnovAge Greater California PACE Holds Job Fair

SAN BERNARDINO, CA-  InnovAge Greater California PACE-Inland Empire will hold a job fair on Thursday, August 22 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the center, 410 E. Parkcenter Circle North, San Bernardino. InnovAge Greater California PACE is an innovative Medicare/Medi-Cal program for older adults and people over 55 living with disabilities. It includes integrated healthcare, in-home services and a day program. The InnovAge San Bernardino facility opens October 2013. At the job fair, InnovAge will hire for several open positions, including: Home Care CNAs, Day Center Health CNAs, Administrative Assistant III, CDL Drivers, Physical Therapists, Activities Assistant, Receptionist, Occupational Therapists, Marketing Specialist, Manager-Home Care, IT Applications Specialist II, Eligibility RN, Medical Records Technician and Facilities Maintenance Tech. In addition to these positions, InnovAge will interview for a number of other future jobs based at the center. For more information about InnovAge, please visit www.MyInnovAge.org.

Girls Youth Group Visits KRESTMORE Farms

 Brandi Mack (center, in hat) directs a girl's program at Hunters Point

Brandi Mack (center, in hat) directs a girl’s program at Hunters Point

FONTANA, CA-  A group of girls from Hunters Point Family organization based in San Francisco made a visit to KRESTMORE Farms in Fontana where they helped Sis. Nova with weeding in the farm. Hunters Point Family organization has an entity called Girls 2000, a safe haven where girls give and receive support as they overcome the complex challenged they face in becoming self-filled individuals, future leaders and role models in their community. Through project-based learning and opportunities to exercise leadership, girls gain the knowledge, skills and self-confidence required to participate fully in their own empowerment process. GIRLS 2000 develops and leads activities based on the HPF philosophy that our youth can transform their current reality if they are given opportunities to gain awareness of their capabilities, develop the courage and ability to make life-affirming decisions, and have access to necessary resources and support. For more information on the program, please visit hunterspointfamily.org.

 

Power Walker Walks from Corona to Oakland

Yolanda Holder

Yolanda Holder

CORONA, CA- Imagine walking 521 miles in a 15 day period. You’re engulfed by extreme heat, sweat pours down your brow, and with every step your feet throb like a heartbeat. This will soon be the reality for Yolanda Holder, Guinness World Record holder for most marathons run in a year. Yolanda has experienced many hardships to get to the top, but nothing could prepare her for the loss of both parents to type 2 diabetes. When her mother passed September 2,2012, Holder vowed to do her part to prevent diabetes from taking another loved one. Despite being grief stricken, she took to action and ‘Extreme Walk 4 Diabetes’ was born.  On August 19th, she will embark on an amazing journey across California, starting in Corona, at Corona Nissan and finishing in Oakland, at the American Diabetes Association office, on the anniversary of her mother Annette Norton’s passing. Her mission is to promote the benefits of walking 30 minutes a day and encourage people of all ages to get out and get fit while having fun! Holder hopes to raise over $5,000 when she crosses the finish line in Oakland. She is also encouraging her fans, and supporters to join her as she passes through their cities. You can track Yolanda’s progress through her Facebook page and at www.yolandaholder.com.

Calling All Student Actors, Singers and Dancers

ICPA Dancer

ICPA Dancer

UPLAND, CA- The Inland Conservatory for the Performing Arts School (ICPA) will be hosting auditions for youth ages 8 to 16 to be a part of its Acting Ensemble. Youth will be auditioning to be a part of the school’s theater department where they will participate in classes lead by Professor Bianca Swan. Classes include plays, musicals, scene study and monologue study. Auditions will be held at the ICPA Headquarters, 814 Alpine Street, Upland, CA 91786, on Saturday, August 17 at 10 a.m. For more information or to register online, visit www.icpa-ca.com/auditions.

 

Field of Dreams Takes Place at 66ers San Manuel Stadium

field

SAN BERNARDINO, CA- Experience the rematch in the 2013 2nd Annual softball game! This year’s theme is “Field of Dreams”. The competing teams are Joe’s Thugs and Ray’s Wild Band. The event will take place Thursday August 15, 2013, from 5:30-9:00 p.m. in the Inland Empire’s 66ers San Manuel stadium. There will also be a special tribute and jersey retirement presented by Anne Mayer RCTC Executive Director, to honor former CTC Executive Director Bimla Rhinehart. Who will dominate the field? Who will come out victorious? Come and find out!

 

Article II of an 11-part Series on Race in America – Past and Present

Emmett and Trayvon: How Racial Prejudice Has Changed in the Last 60 Years

By Elijah Anderson

elijah

elijah

Separated by a thousand miles, two state borders, and nearly six decades, two young African- American boys met tragic fates that seem remarkably similar today: both walked into a small market to buy some candy; both ended up dead.

The first boy is Emmett Till, who was 14 years old in the summer of 1955 when he walked into a local grocery store in Money, Miss., to buy gum. He was later roused from bed, beaten brutally, and possibly shot by a group of White men who later dumped his body in a nearby river. They claimed he had stepped out of his place by flirting with a young White woman, the wife of the store’s owner. The second boy is Trayvon Martin, who was 17 years old late last winter when he walked into a 7-Eleven near a gated community in Sanford, Fla., to buy Skittles and an iced tea.

He was later shot to death at close range by a mixed-race man, who claimed Martin had behaved suspiciously and seemed out of place. The deaths of both boys galvanized the nation, drew sympathy and disbelief across racial lines, and, through the popular media, prompted a reexamination of race relations.

In the aftermath of Martin’s death last February, a handful of reporters and columnists, and many members of the general public, made the obvious comparison: Trayvon Martin, it seemed, was the Emmett Till of our times. And, while that comparison has some merit-the boys’ deaths are similar both in some of their details and in their tragic outcome-these killings must also be understood as the result of very different strains of racial tension in America.

The racism that led to Till’s death was embedded in a virulent ideology of White racial superiority born out of slavery and the Jim Crow codes, particularly in the Deep South. That sort of racism hinges on the idea that Blacks are an inherently inferior race, a morally null group that deserves both the subjugation and poverty it gets.

The racial prejudice that led to Trayvon Martin’s death is different. While it, too, was born of America’s painful legacy of slavery and segregation, and informed by those old concepts of racial order-that Blacks have their “place” in  society-it in addition reflects the urban iconography of today’s racial inequality, namely the Black ghetto, a uniquely urban American creation. Strikingly, this segregation of the Black community coexists with an ongoing racial incorporation process that has produced the largest Black middle class in history, and that reflects the extraordinary social progress this country has made since the 1960s. The civil rights movement paved the way for Blacks and other people of color to access public and professional opportunities and spaces that would have been unimaginable in Till’s time.

While the sort of racism that led to Till’s death still exists in society today, Americans in general have a much more nuanced, more textured attitude toward race than anything we’ve seen before, and usually that attitude does not manifest in overtly hateful, exclusionary, or violent acts. Instead, it manifests in pervasive mindsets and stereotypes that all Black people start from the inner-city ghetto and are therefore stigmatized by their association with its putative amorality, danger, crime, and poverty. Hence, in public, a Black person is burdened with a negative presumption that he or she must disprove before being able to establish mutually trusting relationships with others.

Most consequentially, Black skin when seen in public, and its association with the ghetto, translates into a deficit of credibility as Black skin is conflated with lower-class status. Such attitudes impact poor Blacks of the ghetto one way and middle-class Black people in another way.

While middle-class Blacks may be able to successfully overcome the negative presumptions of others, lower-class Blacks may not. For instance, all Blacks, particularly “ghetto-looking” young men, are at risk of enduring yet another “stop and frisk” from the police as well as discrimination from potential employers shopkeepers, and strangers on the street. Members of the Black middle class and Black professionals may ultimately pass inspection and withstand such scrutiny; many poorer blacks cannot. And many Blacks who have never stepped foot in a ghetto must repeatedly prove themselves as non-ghetto, often operating in a provisional status (with something more to prove), in the workplace or, say, a fancy restaurant, until they can convince others-either by speaking “White” English or by demonstrating intelligence, poise, or manners-that they are to be trusted, that they are not “one of those” Blacks from the ghetto, and that they deserve respect. In other words, a middle-class Black man who is, for instance, waiting in line for an ATM at night will in many cases be treated with a level of suspicion that a middle-class White man simply does not experience.

But this pervasive cultural association-Black skin equals the ghetto-does not come out of the blue. After all, as a result of historical, political, and economic factors, Blacks have been contained in the ghetto. Today, with persistent housing discrimination and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, America’s ghettos face structural poverty. In addition, crime and homicide rates within those communities are high, young Black men are typically the ones killing one another, and ghetto culture – made iconic by artists like Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, and the Notorious B.I.G. – is inextricably intertwined with blackness.

As a result, in America’s collective imagination the ghetto is a dangerous, scary part of the city. It’s where rap comes from, where drugs are sold, where hoodlums rule, and where The Wire might have been filmed. Above all, to many White Americans the ghetto is where “the Black people live,” and thus, as the misguided logic follows, all Black people live in the ghetto. It’s that pervasive, if accidental, fallacy that’s at the root of the wider society’s perceptions of Black people today. While it may be true that everyone who lives in a certain ghetto is Black, it is patently untrue that everyone who is Black lives in a ghetto. Regardless, Black people of all classes, including those born and raised far from the inner cities and those who’ve never been in a ghetto, are by virtue of skin color alone stigmatized by the place.

I call this idea the “iconic ghetto,” and it has become a powerful source of stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination in our society, negatively defining the Black person in public. In some ways, the iconic ghetto reflects the old version of racism that led to Till’s death. In Till’s day, a Black person’s “place” was in the field, in the maid’s quarters, or in the back of the bus. If a Black man was found “out of his place,” he could be punished, jailed, or lynched. In Martin’s day-in our day-a Black person’s “place” is in the ghetto. If he is found “out of his place,” like in a fancy hotel lobby, on a golf course, or, say, in an upscale community, he may easily be mistaken, treated with suspicion, avoided, pulled over, frisked, arrested-or worse.

Trayvon Martin’s death is an example of how this more current type of racial stereotyping works. While the facts of the case are still under investigation, from what is known it seems fair to say that George Zimmerman, Martin’s killer, saw a young Black man wearing a hoodie and assumed he was from the ghetto and therefore “out of place” in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, Zimmerman’s gated community. Until recently, Twin Lakes was a relatively safe, largely middle-class neighborhood. But as a result of collapsing housing prices, it has been witnessing an influx of renters and a rash of burglaries. Some of the burglaries have been committed by Black men. Zimmerman, who is himself of mixed race (of Latino, Black, and White descent), did not have a history of racism, and his family has claimed that he had previously volunteered handing out leaflets at Black churches protesting the assault of a homeless Black man.

The point is, it appears unlikely that Zimmerman shot and killed Martin simply because he hates Black people as a race. It seems that he put a gun in his pocket and followed Martin after making the assumption that Martin’s Black skin and choice of dress meant that he was from the ghetto, and therefore up to no good; he was considered to be a threat. And that’s an important distinction.

Zimmerman acted brashly and was almost certainly motivated by assumptions about young black men, but it is not clear that he acted brutally out of hatred for Martin’s race. That certainly does not make Zimmerman’s actions excusable, Till’s murderers acted out of racial hatred.

The complex racially charged drama that led to Martin’s death is indicative of both our history and our rapid and uneven racial progress as a society. While there continue to be clear demarcations separating Blacks and Whites in social strata, major racial changes have been made for the better. It’s no longer uncommon to see Black people in positions of power, privilege, and prestige, in top positions in boardrooms, universities, hospitals, and judges’ chambers, but we must also face the reality that poverty, unemployment, and incarceration still break down largely along racial lines.

This situation fuels the iconic ghetto, including a prevalent assumption among many White Americans, even among some progressive Whites who are not by any measure traditionally racist, that there are two types of Blacks: those residing in the ghetto, and those who appear to have played by the rules and become successful. In situations in which Black people encounter strangers, many often feel they have to prove as quickly as possible that they belong in the latter category in order to be accepted and treated with respect.

As a result of this pervasive dichotomy-that there are “ghetto” and “non-ghetto” Blacks-many middle-class Blacks actively work to separate and distance themselves from the popular association of their race with the ghetto by deliberately dressing well or by spurning hip-hop, rap, and ghetto styles of dress. Similarly, some Blacks, when interacting with Whites, may cultivate an overt, sometimes unnaturally formal way of speaking to distance themselves from “those” black people from the ghetto.

But it’s also not that simple. Strikingly, many middle class Black young people, most of whom have no personal connection with the ghetto, go out of their way in the other direction, claiming the ghetto by adopting its symbols, including styles of dress, patterns of speech, or choice of music, as a means of establishing their authenticity as “still Black” in the largely White middle class they feel does not fully accept them; they want to demonstrate they have not “sold out.” Thus, the iconic ghetto is, paradoxically, both a stigma and a sign of authenticity for some American Blacks-a kind of double bind that beleaguers many middle-class Black parents.

Despite the significant racial progress our society has made since Till’s childhood, from the civil rights movement to the re-election of President Obama, the pervasive association of Black people with the ghetto, and therefore with a certain social station, betrays a persistent cultural lag. After all, it has only been two generations since schools were legally desegregated and five decades since Blacks and Whites in many parts of the country started drinking from the same water fountains.

If Till were alive today, he’d remember when restaurants had “White Only” entrances and when stories of lynchings peppered The New York Times. He’d also remember the Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Million Man March. He’d remember when his peers became generals and justices, and when a Black man, just 20 years his junior, became president of the United States. As I am writing, he would have been 73 – had he lived.

Elijah Anderson is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University. His latest book is The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. This article, the second of an 11-part series on race, is sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and was originally published by the Washington Monthly Magazine.

Story 1 o?f 11-part Series on ?Race in America – Pa?st and Present?

BOTTOMLINE…

Douglas A. Blackmon is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” He teaches at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and is a contributing editor at the Washington Post. This article, the first of an 11-part series on race, is sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and was originally published by the Washington Monthly Magazine

In the first years after the Civil War, even as former slaves optimistically swarmed into new schools and lined up at courthouses at every whisper of a hope of economic independence, the Southern states began enacting an array of interlocking laws that would make all African-Americans criminals, regardless of their conduct, and thereby making it legal to force them into chain gangs, labor camps, and other forms of involuntarily servitude. By the end of 1865, every Southern state except Arkansas and Tennessee had passed laws outlawing vagrancy and defining it so vaguely that virtually any freed slave not under the protection of a White man could be arrested for the crime. An 1865 Mississippi statute required Black workers to enter into labor contracts with White farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest. Four other states legislated that African Americans could not legally be hired for work without a discharge paper from their previous employer-effectively preventing them from leaving the plantation of the White man they worked for.

After the return of nearly complete White political control in 1877, the passage of those laws accelerated. Some, particularly those that explicitly said they applied only to African-Americans, were struck down in court appeals or through federal interventions, but new statutes embracing the same strictures on Black life quickly replaced them. Most of the new laws were written as if they applied to everyone, but in reality they were overwhelmingly enforced only against African- Americans.

In the 1880s, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida passed laws making it a crime for a Black man to change employers without permission. It was a crime for a Black man to speak loudly in the company of a White woman, a crime to have a gun in his pocket, and a crime to sell the proceeds of his farm to anyone other than the man he rented land from. It was a crime to walk beside a railroad line, a crime to fail to yield a sidewalk to White people, a crime to sit among Whites on a train, and it was most certainly a crime to engage in sexual relations with-or, God forbid, to show true love and affection for-a White girl.

Artist of the Week: Sity Counsil

Lue Dowdy

Lue Dowdy

By LuCretia Dowdy

This week artist review is of Sity Council, an independent record label founded and ran by Executive Producer Mike Anthony also known as Mike Diesel or Dieselio. This independent record label is making some serious noise in the streets. Upon completing his MBA, Anthony’s dream was to establish a label in order to help promote independent artists. Gathering all his resources, Anthony created SITY COUNCIL. The labels production team consist of Claibonics as the certified sound engineer and producer JRock.

Currently, Sity Counsil is focusing on building their brand by mobilizing a street team to expand their fan base. Their future goals consist of a production deal with a major label and establishing a charity to give back to the community.

Sity Counsil

Sity Counsil

Artists that are signed to the label consists of hip-hop artist MI$FIT THE BORN HUSTLA”  who’s  single, “Where Dey Do Dat At” drops on August 27, 2013.  The other artist is “IRA LEE” who currently has an album out called Fishtanks and Flatscreens with songs available on iTunes.

Upcoming events for Sity Counsil include an album release party and WDDDA video shoot on August 3 at Rack’s in Corona.

For more information on Sity Council visit SITYCOUNSIL.COM or email Mike Anthony at contact@sitycounsil.com.

Black Rose Awards Calls For Nominations

Black Culture Foundation Committee

Black Culture Foundation Committee

SAN BERNARDINO, CA-  Now is the time to nominate unsung heroes in your community for the 24th Annual Black Culture Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year, Community Service and Black Rose Awards, which take place Friday, September 13 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the National Orange Show Renaissance Room, 689 South E Street.

To nominate someone for this award, go to www.sbbcfoundation.org to download a nomination form, or email the incoming chair Troy Ingram at firstvice@sbbcfoundation.org.  Nominations are due by July 31. The Foundation is now selling tickets to the award ceremony at the price of $60 per person, until August 17.  Tickets purchased after that date will be $75. To order tickets or reserve a table, contact Troy Ingram at firstvice@sbbcfoundation.org.

Krstmoor/Crestmore Produces Fresh Produce Every Saturday

KRSTMoor 1SAN BERNARDINO, CA- For  those that are trying to eat healthier or love fresh produce, then the KRSTMoor/Crestmore Produce Stand is the place to go. Every Saturday at the Dorothy Ingram Library from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. there will be a booth for KRSTMoor/Crestmore Produce. The market offers whole, fresh and self sustainably grown produce that support healing and healthy nutrition. In addition to fresh produce, KRSTMoor has several new features to better cater to customers, which include an EBT machine and a food box program. The food box program offers a delivery program in the Inland Empire that consists of fresh farm produce. Vendors are also needed for the Farmers Market. If you have products that you produce or distribute, please contact KRSTMoor Produce.  The Dorothy Ingram Library is located at 1505 W. Highland Avenue, San Bernardino, CA 92311. For more information on KRSTMoor farms contact Sis Nova Kafele at 562-786-9898 or visit krstmoorproduce.spruz.com.