Uptown Notes

“All the real OGs, I’m a solider cause you told me study Malcolm, Garvey, Huey/ Study Malcolm, Garvey, Huey, their life […]

Recently, I had the pleasure of appearing on “Our World with Black Enterprise” hosted by Marc Lamont Hill. The show […]

The recent buzz around education reform is growing, but silenced in this buzz is race. The amazingly taboo yet significant social phenomena is giving way to colorblind policy makers and educational activists. Can we truly transform an educational system if we don’t take account of one of its most enduring cleavages?

For the past few years, I have been diligently working on issues of inequality in well-resourced school settings. My book […]

This week “Waiting for Superman” premiered nationally and it has reignited the conversation on the United States’ failing schools. The […]

Yesterday, protests at Ground Zero continued to gain international attention. What’s at issue is a figment of the American public’s imagination: the ground zero mosque. Herds of “well-intentioned” Americans flooded lower manhattan to chant down the construction of what they are calling a ground zero mosque, but what really is an Islamic community center. This case is a powerful lesson in framing, which I was first introduced to by the George Lakoff but you and I experience constantly. If we want to make sure The Community Center at Park 51 is built, we’ve got to re-frame the conversation, or else the Islamophobes have won!

Recently, I penned a piece discussing the need for Black folks to join in with the fight against Arizona’s racist immigration […]

Yesterday the NYTimes ran an interesting Op-Ed piece on Charter Schools by Charles Murray entitled, “Why Charter Schools Fail the Test.” I read through it quickly and thought it to be arguing two main things: standardized tests were weak measures and that school choice was a democratic right. Sounds agreeable, right? But why was this written by Charles Murray author of the thinly veiled racist polemic The Bell Curve?

Unless you have been in hiding, you have noticed the Census 2010 is in full swing now. From rapping commercials […]

A look at what happens when race and gender are uncorked in a chicago eatery