Blacks, mirroring larger U.S. trend, 'come out' as nonbelievers

Standing before a room full of fellow African-Americans, Jamila Bey took a deep breath and announced she's come out of the closet.

Her soul-bearing declaration is nearly taboo, she says.

"It's the A-word," said Bey, 33, feigning a whisper. "You commit social suicide as a black person when you say you're an atheist."

Bey and other black atheists, agnostics and secularists are struggling to openly affirm their secular viewpoints in a community that's historically heralded as one of America's most religious.

At the first African Americans for Humanism conference recently hosted by the non-profit Center for Inquiry, about 50 people gathered to discuss the ins and outs of navigating their dual identities as blacks and followers of the non-religious philosophy known as humanism.
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Has Reality TV Become Black Women's Enemy?

Remember the ''real'' housewife named Sheree? Whose only claim to fame is that she was once married to a professional football player? Remember how she yanked housewife Kim's blond wig and called her white trash outside of a fashionable Atlanta restaurant? (Kim, the sole Caucasian Atlanta ''housewife'' whose married lover's checks allows her to pay $3,000 on a regular basis to get the fat rolled from her thighs.) Read the rest here

``I abhor racism, I think it's a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant, but at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.'' -- Rand Paul
If you notice, they have never been on our side.
``They'' meaning social conservatives. ``Our'' meaning African-American people.
They were not there in the century after the Civil War, as conservative Southern Democrats violently repressed would-be black voters, made a shadow government of the Ku Klux Klan, turned a deaf ear to the howling of lynch mobs and lynch victims. They have not been there in the half century since, as conservative Southern Republicans fought affirmative action, poverty programs and attempts to ban the American swastika, i.e., the Confederate battle flag, from public lands.
They have never been on our side and always, they have claimed ``principle'' to justify it. So remarks like the one above that got Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul in trouble last week are surprising only in the sense that one is surprised to hear an oldie on the radio one hasn't heard in awhile.
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A longstanding debate about the relevance of "The Black Church" has resurfaced recently. In February Princeton University religion professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. penned an op-ed piece for The Huffington Post titled "The Black Church Is Dead." This created a firestorm of sorts amongst black professors and clergy while the matter was debated even further on blogs and social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Read the rest of the article here

My Hip Hop Role Model

A few years ago the young and tumultuous life of Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson was depicted in a motion picture titled after his 2002 debut album, Get Rich or Die Trying. The film was accompanied by a soundtrack and a book length autobiography, From Pieces to Weight. His music, film, and autobiography tell a rags to riches story of a poor black kid from Jamaica Queens, New York who hustles his way out of chronic poverty, rising from a nihilistic drug dealer to a hip hop superstar and businessman. His story of struggle and hustle is the mythological stuff that consumers of hip hop love and what is typically called the American Dream. Hip hop artists thrive off of this mythology and without it hip hop would not be hip hop. In fact, no hip hop artist is credible and authentic apart from this myth.
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Henry Louis Gates and a Response

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage. Read more of Gates' article here.
Read a response here