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The Politics of Color and the NFL
By Lynn Williams and Beth Beatrice Smith
On February 4th, an NFL first will also become a proud moment in African American history  two Black coaches will take the field with their teams to compete in the Superbowl, guaranteeing an African American coach claims the winning spot. This scenario was only a hope when friends and former colleagues Herm Edwards, Tony Dungy, and Lovie Smith met for dinner before the wildcard playoff games. Their hope became a dream come true. Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith represent two of only six African American head coaches in the NFL.
Lovie Smith began his professional coaching career in 1996 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a linebacker coach and while there worked closely with Tony Dungy. The Chicago Bears hired Smith in 2004, and with the team s dramatic rise in rank came an Associated Press NFL Coach of the Year Award for Smith in 2005. Although criticism of key decisions was soon to follow, Smith once again prevailed with a 13 3 record for the 2006 season.
On January 21st, Smith became the first African American coach to lead his team to the Superbowl literally hours before former mentor Dungy became the second. A sturdy leader, Smith is also a wonderful role model, supporting the American Diabetes Association, providing tickets for Bears games to children suffering with Diabetes, and donating to college tuition funds through his own Lovie and MaryAnne Smith Foundation.
While Smith warmed in the sun rays of Florida, Dungy began his coaching career in layers at the University of Minnesota in 1980. From there, he entered the NFL coaching scene in 1981 as an assistant coach to the Steelers. It was thought that he would become the first African American head coach. But after Tony Dungy reached the then glass ceiling of coaching for African Americans, defensive coordinator, he was repeatedly denied interviews for head coaching positions. Accepting defensive coaching and coordinating positions with the Kansas City Chiefs and the Minnesota Vikings, Dungy finally received his due when he was asked to become head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1995. Although he coached his team to the playoffs three times and a division title in 1999, Dungy was fired by the Buccaneers in 2001. But when one door closes, another one opens. 
Dungy became head coach of the Indianapolis Colts on January 22, 2002.
On Sunday, January 21, history was made when Dungy led his team to victory in a playoff game versus the New England Patriots, securing their position against the Chicago Bears, yet another team led by an AfricanAmerican coach, Lovie Smith.
Many may look to the 2002 Rooney Rule as a factor in this years Superbowl result.
Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Chairman for the NFL committee on workplace diversity, has earned credit for diversifying the NFL with this rule which requires all NFL teams to interview minority candidates for coaching jobs. However, Coach Dungy was the head coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers prior to 2002 and had already proven himself with a long career.
Football fans will have much to be proud of when Smith with his Bears and Dungy with his Colts take to the field this Sunday. African Americans specifically can also stand tall. These are two Black men who are making headlines for positives which touch not only our community but the nation at large. We say good luck to youand well done.
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The Fallacy of Hope
By K.B. McDavid
Authoring the book The Audacity of Hope prior to announcing his decision to run for President was a move of sheer political genius by Barack Obama. However, I am not one to believe in this new Black messiah, and I am not one to buy into a message of hope.
Hope is a powerful word. It is also a dangerous word. Hope can lead to a wishful state of inactivity. Ask yourself if you would rather someone say,  I just hope things will get better or I know how to make things better I believe in miracles. I believe in divine intervention. I was baptized. But I also believe when a man says yes, his Chi says yes. A man can make things happen.
Obama is a newcomer and has to navigate some dangerous waters. Al Sharpton, like him or not, has an established following. Politics is about power, and Al Sharpton has a power base that he controls. Barack Obama is in a powerful position but just one scandal away from being unemployed. That is the reality of elected office. Al Sharpton would survive a nuclear war he is the Timex watch of Black politics, he can take a licking and kept on ticking.
Let me be clear, I am not an Obama hater. I will listen to what Senator Obama has to say. Issues that I am interested in hearing his views on are reparations for Slavery, U.S. hegemony in Africa and the Caribbean, and what he intends to do with the incredible number of incarcerated Black males. I have yet to read his latest book, but I am not into books. I am into voting records and policy initiatives and legislation written. Books are cute, but legislation is what we need. Not books, new laws.
I asked my friend why he was such a fan of Obamas. He said that Obama is the only one that will give America hope. I was saddened that my friend had espoused the Black upper middle class concept that the fate of Black America is tied to the fate of America. The fate of Black families whose income is over  150,000 looks promising, but most other Blacks, like the rest of America, are struggling. I asked my friend repeatedly to give me some policy reason to indicate why Black America should be excited about an Obama Presidency. When he did not give me a satisfactory answer, I decided to research the topic myself. I do not believe that the fate of Black America is tied to that of America. America has been pretty consistent in its treatment of Blacks.
Just look at Sean Bell, Gerald Washington, high school dropout rates, a million plus Black men in jail its a long list. What more do we need to have happen to understand that the American system does not work for us
I believe Obama tries. He has a good record. Not the Black Panther I want in the White House, but he has a good record. Here are some of the good things he has done, and some of the things that people need to know when asked why they support Barack Obama for President, instead of just saying he provides hope. Obama
- Voted against letting people argue self-defense in court if charged with violating local weapons bans by using a gun in their home.
 2004
- Voted to let retired police and military police carry concealed weapons. 2004
- Voted against making gang members eligible for the death penalty if they kill someone to help their gang. 2001
- Successfully sponsored requirement that law enforcement videotape interrogations of suspects in some serious crimes. 2003
- Successfully sponsored law enforcement study of the race of people pulled over for traffic tickets. 2003
- Helped pass an overhaul of the state's troubled death penalty system. 2003
- Unsuccessfully sponsored measure to expunge some criminal records and create an employment grant program for ex-criminals.2002
- Unsuccessfully sponsored limit of one handgun purchase per month. 2000
The Average American will have to step up his or her game. The only hope for America is for each citizen to start educating himself or herself in the realities of the world. Americans dont live a life of freedomwe live a life of consumerism. Our religion is based on acquisition of material things. We go to church, temple and mosque to show off our material things. Obama can provide hope, but that is a false illusion.
Black America needs to separate itself intellectually from white America. Black America need not focus on the 2008 presidential race it will do little to change the lives of the average Black man or woman. What we need to focus on are our municipal and state elected officials. The City Councilman or the State Assemblywoman are more important to your lives that your president. They set the policy that directly affects you. Black America needs to focus on the local electoral system to begin to build a solid political base. Think of it as a pyramid. Without a solid base, a Black president would be a weak and inept figure head.
What would that do for us We need to build up a power base and it starts with the local political infrastructures right in your neighborhood. Change is in your hands. Time to wake up from this Dream some call it a nightmare, stop waiting for Jesus, and control our own destinies. Local politics is the answer Business  Politics  Power.
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Achieving  The Dream at What Price?
By Justin Mitchell
Over the Christmas Holiday, I made my usual pilgrimage to Detroit, the city in which my parents were both born and raised, to visit my extended family. Although during most of my formative years I lived in the Texas, I always felt that Detroit was my spiritual and emotional home. I spent most of my summers and winters there living with my grandparents in a neighborhood that, during my parents childhood, was home to Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye, Barry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, various members of the Temptations, and a host of other Motown legends. For me, Detroit, with its longstanding tradition of African
American music, political activism, entrepreneurship, and even alternative religion many forget that the Nation of Islam began there not Chicago always represented culture, my culture. It represented my parents history and my parents memories, which, as if encoded in my DNA, were, in turn, somehow my history and my memories. Its rich history made it seem epic, but the fact that I could locate my own family legacy within such a grand scheme, a narrative that
begins in the hellish confines of slavery and ends, after the Great Migration, in the expansive, hopeful space of the City, where the haggard children of slaves became world famous for the astonishing breadth of their cultural productions, made me feel special and authentic.
So you can imagine how excited I was to see this mythology dramatized on screen in the new movie Dreamgirls. And you can also imagine how incredibly sacrosanct it felt to see it with much of my extended family, everyone from my cantankerous, octogenarian grandfather to my unremittingly ebullient godmother. We all watched, somewhat proudly, as the rise and fall of a trio resembling our Supremes took place against the backdrop of the rise and fall of a city resembling our Detroit, a city that went from embodying so much that is great in this country to so much that is horribly wrong with it.
The decline of black Detroit began with the riots of 1967, which, like those that erupted in Watts, Harlem, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Newark around the same time, left many vibrant neighborhoods and commercial districts in complete ruins, symbolizing new depths in AfricanAmerican despair. It was an event that presaged the cultural selfdestruction that would occur in the 80s and continue up to now.
For many AfricanAmericans of my generation who grew up orbiting the aftermath of this destruction in safe, overwhelmingly white and unfriendly enclaves, the City of our parents time, with its cultural vitality and sense of community, remains an attractive ideal. We long to escape the cultural alienation of the fringes. I must admit that this is precisely what brought me to New York. I knew, of course, that most of todays young AfricanAmericans were moving in a reverse migration to new urban centers in the South. But, having lived in Atlanta, I also knew that such places are mostly bastions of philistinism, mere shadows and embarrassing simulacrums of the places that preceded them up North. Thus far,
they have produced no art, no culture, no intellectual capital to speak of. And they certainly do not satisfy ones fraternal longings.
I came to New York hoping to catch the ship before it sailed completely away, before all traces of AfricanAmerican cosmopolitanism were erased from the face of the earth. What I found, unfortunately, when I came here was a city in which the extant AfricanAmerican communityif we can still call it that, a communityappears to be mired in either underclass pathology or effete urbanity, both of which are indicative of a kind of mass cultural suicide that is taking place among us all over the country. I found a people unable and unwilling to organize and effectively articulate their opposition to the gentrification of their communities, a people who have made very little effort to preserve their highest
values and ideals. In short, I found a people suffering from the same economic, social, and cultural problems you see in places like Detroit and Atlanta, perhaps even more so.
Somehow I thought that black New York was surviving the national struggle, even undergoing some sort of revival. Of course, places like Harlem and BedStuy, the two cultural centers of black New York, are being rebuilt, on the strength of their reputations and rich traditions, not, for the most part, by AfricanAmericans but by whites, especially yuppies and hipsters. Someone sees their value and potential as revitalized centers of culture. Too bad its not us.
I suppose this is simply my circuitous manner of making a plea let us, for once, stop waiting before its too late to value what it is that we have. Let us not allow the City, with all its possibilities for reinvention, to slip between our fingers. Let us not find ourselves, yet againperhaps this time permanentlyon the outskirts, powerless, desperate. Let us not simply abandon our rich legacy in favor
bourgeois pretension or ghetto chic. Let us instead take back our communities and our culture, reassess and codify our highest values. Let us make use of the cultural capital of the City and use it to refine our tastes and those of our children, particularly our young men who seem to think that our greatest contribution to the world is gangster rap. Because if we dont somebody else will. And if you dont believe me, just ask anyone who lived in Harlem before there was a Starbucks.
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The Forgotten: Homeless in NYC
By Danielle Young
Attention ladies and gentlemen... Youve heard it before, the call of the homeless. Whether youre on the train, on the street, anywhere really, theyre always there. I am originally from the South, and homeless people exist, of course, but they usually arent right in our faces.
So when I moved here and saw homeless people begging with their sad stories, my heart went out. I spent over 100 in a week trying to help the unhelpable. My friends would tell me that I shouldnt hand out money so freely just because I hear a sob story from someone on the train. I guess I was naive, but I thought every little bit helped.
But its so hard to help when so many people are without homes. One in 20 New Yorkers experiences homelessness. Even the soup kitchens turn down more than 2,500 people daily. So, as it turns out, many homeless people are forgotten because helping is virtually impossible. People walk by them on the street and dont give the huddled mass on the sidewalk a second glance. Even when the homeless deliver their monologues on the train, passengers still ignore them. It seems that I am the only one digging in my wallet for cash to try and make a difference.
Every night, over 38,000 homeless individuals sleep in the New York City shelters. This includes more than 16,000 children and 8,000 adults. Thousands more sleep on city streets and in other public places.
It's important to remember that not every homeless person is a drug addict or alcoholic. There are other ways to end up on the street and perhaps New Yorkers should think about that before just passing by. Families make up 78 of New York Citys homeless shelter population. Just because you dont see them out on the street, doesnt mean that they dont exist.
Of course New Yorkers know that homeless people are there, but its a paradox. You may be able to help one, but you cannot help them all. So does every bit help How much is enough to make a difference to the homeless person you try and help And, how can you trust them to use the money you give them for food or something more beneficial than a quick fix
So how can you help By trying to forget Is that the key that New Yorkers have all figured out Just walk on by and try not to look at the sad faces as you pass by Dont be afraid to give. Allow these men and women to spend the money on whatever they want. At least you gave, thats my theory. Also, volunteering is helpful and rewarding. Take some time out of your schedule to visit a homeless shelter and you will not only be helping
against the fight of homelessness, but also gaining a greater appreciation for all that you have been blessed with. www.robinhood.org. Check it out, maybe you could help the homeless not to be forgotten.
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